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TEXAS STATE LIBRARY
What that contingency is, I will now proceed to explain. Since the appearance of my reply to that call to which I refer, a most extraordinary, but not unexpected, financial revulsion has occur- red, (not unexpected to those who looked beyond the mere surface of things,) which has desolated a portion of our country, spreading havoc and ruin far and wide. I said that this revulsion was not unex- pected to those who looked beyond the mere surface of things, be- cause it is the natural and unavoidable result of a radically unsound and vicious commercial system, which works through the instrumental- ity of a still more vicious mode of imposing and collecting the reve- nues of the country, which has inflicted deep injury on every State in this Union, and ten thousand curses on the South. Evils so stu- pendous in their character, if not speedily terminated, must end in our irretrievable ruin. From what source do they flow? More than sewn-tenths of the entire revenue of this country are collected in the city of New York, through the instrumentality of an iniquitous tariff, which, in the progress of the last thirty years, has led to the accumulation and ·centralization in that city of most of the circulating capital of the country, which has gone to augment its riches and to pamper an in- ordinate spirit of gigantic and profligate speculation, which, by its natural reaction, has brought on its portion of the country calami- ties which usually attend the worse rewrses of the most desolating wars. These results are to be seen at the North in the utter pros- tration of all public and private credit - in the downfall of those merchant princes in that proud emporium; failures too numerous to chronicle; banks without number, which have been compelled to sus- pend; thousands of laborers, of both sexes, in a state of utter destitu- tion, and a horde of desperados thronging the different avenues of the city, threaten violence, for bread, to person and property, which rather belongs to a barbarous than civilized age. A severe censor might say, as they have brought these evils upon themselves, it is right they should suffer. But they are not the only sufferers. The whole country, in a modified degree, is made to feel these calamities. The rotten speculations of Kew York in railroad se- curities, and almost in every other species of investment, have cost the South at least thirty millions of dollars in the last six weeks, in the fall in the price of our great staples of cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar and breadstuffs. This sum is far below the mark, but quite enough for my purpose. But for the short cotton crop of the last and present year, sustained by its imperious necessity to prevent revolution in G,eat Britain - the natural result of starvation and hunger - this astonishingly elastic staple would now be down to four or five cents per pound, to which it may yet go if the Bank of England put a turn or two more on the screw. Coul(l New York have inflicted these curses on the country, but for a centralization of the wealth of the Southern States, through the agency of an unsound commercial system, brought and pampered into exist<'aee by the original sin of our accursed tariff? \\'hat, tlwu, is the n•medy? A radical change in the mode of rais- ing the reH•11ues of the couutry, which shall be equivalent to its nec- essary and unavoidable expt>IHlitures. You ask how is this to be ef-
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