Standard, an administration paper, published at Charleston, South Carolina. It is a frank, bold statement of the policy of the administration upon the Slavery question, which our readers will do well to look at by way of refreshing themselves. It will amply repay perusal :

"A general rupture in Europe would force upon us the undisputed sway of the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indies, with all their rich and mighty productions. Guided by our genius and enterprise, a new world would rise there, as it did before under the genius of Columbus. With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world. Our true policy is to look to Brazil as the next great Slave power, and as the government that is to direct or license the development of the country drained by the Amazon. Instead of courting England, we should look to Brazil and the West Indies. The time will come when a treaty of commerce and alliance with Brazil will give us the control over the Gulf of Mexico and its border countries, together with the islands, and tho consequence of this will place African Slavery beyond the reach of fanaticism, at home or abroad. These two great Slave powers now hold more undeveloped territory than any other two governments, and they ought to guard and strengthen their mutual interests by acting together in strict harmony and concert. Considering our vast resources and the mighty commerce that is about to expand upon the bosom of the two countries, if we act together by treaty we cannot only preserve domestic servitude, but we can defy the power of the world. With firmness and judgment, we can open up the African slave-emigration, again to people the noble region of the tropics. We can boldly defend this upon the most enlarged system of philanthropy. It is far better for tho wild races of Africa themselves. Look at the 3,000,000 in the United States who have had the blessings not only of civilization but of Christianity. Can any man pretend to say that they would have been better off in the barbarian state of their native wilderness? and has not the attempt to suppress, by force, this emigration increased the horrors of the middle passage' tenfold? The good old Las Casas, in 1519, was the first to advise Spain to import Africans to her colonies, as a substitute for the poor Indians, who, from their peculiar nature, were totally unsuited to bear the labors of Slavery. Experience has shown that his scheme was founded in wise and Christian philanthropy. Millions of the black men, yet unborn, will rise up to bless his benevolent memory. The time is coming when we will boldly defend this emigration before the world. The hypocritical cant and whining morality of the latterday saints will die away before the majesty of commerce, and the power of those vast productions which are to spring from the cultivation and full development on the mighty tropical regions in our own hemisphere. If it be mercy to give the grain growing sections of America to tho poor and hungry of Europe, why not open up the tropics to the poor African? The one region is as eminently suited to them as the other is to the white race. There is as much philanthropy in one as the other. We have been too long governed by psalm-singing schoolmasters from the North. It is time to think for ourselves. The folly commenced in our own government uniting with Great Britain to declare Slave importation piracy. Piracy is a crime on the high seas, arising under the law of nations, and it is as well defined by those laws as murder is at common law. And for two nations to attempt to make that piracy which is not so, under the law of nations, is an absurdity. You might as well declare it burglary, or arson, or any thing else. And we have ever since, by a joint fleet with Great Britain on the cost of Africa, been struggling to enforce this miserable blunder. The time will come that all the islands and regions suited to African Slavery, between us and Brazil, will fall under the control of these two Slave powers, in some shape or other, either by treaty or actual possession of the one government or the other. And the statesman who closes his eyes to these results, has but a very small view of the great questions and interests that are looming up in the future. In a few years, there will be no investment of the two hundred millions, in the annual increase of gold on a large scale, so profitable and so necessary, as the development and cultivation of the tropical regions now slumbering in rank and wild luxuriance. If the slaveholding race in these States are but true to themselves, they have a great destiny before them."

As the first steps towards the accomplishment of these objects, we are now to convert the Mesilla Valley into Slave territory, and to arrange for bringing the Negroes of Cuba within the Union, and thus forever to

prevent that island from becoming the property of free black men ; and the mere annual interests of these two purchases to say nothing of the additional army and navy that will be required-will amount to four-fifths of the whole amount now paid for educational purposes throughout the Free States of the Union.

Having studied these facts, we beg our readers now to remark how fully they bear out the statement of the Charleston Courier as to the error of those who suppose "that the action of the general government has been hostile to Slavery." "The truth is," as it continues, "that although hostile in its incipiency, to domestic Slavery, it afterwards so changed its action that it has fostered the Slaveholding interest," and this it has done by taxing the free people of the North for the steady extension of the area of Slavery, while denying the constitutionality of any expenditures tending to the improvement of the lands, or of the people, of the North and West.

Such is a portion of the cost of the Union. What is its value has been shown. On a future occasion we shall furnish some further items of the cost; but meantime will beg our readers to reflect whether a trade that cannot be worth a dozen millions per annum is not dearly paid for by the maintenance of a system that takes from the North so many millions annually to be applied to the purchase of Southern land, and the support of Southern wars, when they might so advantageously be applied to the improvement of rivers and harbors by which Northern farmers could cheaply get to market, and the improvement of schools at which Northern children might be cheaply educated.

THE GREAT STRUGGLE.

The history of the world from the earliest ages is little more than a record of the efforts of the strong who have desired to enslave the weak, and of the counter efforts of the latter to obtain power to work for themselves. The former have, in all ages, been large monopolists of land, while the latter have at all times sought to obtain homesteads to be improved for their own benefit and that of their wives and children. The former have always sought cheap laborers, desiring to purchase at their own prices, the bone, the muscle, and the sinew required for their purposes, selling at the dearest rate the produce of the labor of their slaves; while the latter have always desired to fix the price of their own labor, and to profit by their own exertions. By the former, honest labor has been held in low esteem, because they lived at the cost of those who labored in the field for the production of food or wool, and those in the town who consumed the food while making the cloth. By the latter, labor has been esteemed as a means of acquiring honest independence. In the former class we find the Slave-owners, politicians, and tax-consumers of the world, while in the latter we find the laborers and tax-payers of the world. In the one we find the advocates of armies and navies, war and fillibusterism, and in the other the friends of peace and cheap government.

Between these classes there has, from time immemorial, been a contest for power; the one desiring to tyrannize over others, and the other to govern themselves, and to work for their own profit.

Such is the contest now in progress throughout this country. The great issue of our day is, as we are informed by the Charleston Evening News, "the extension or non-extension, of the institution [Slavery] whose foundations are broad and solid in our midst." It is, whether free labor shall become slave labor, or slave labor become free labor. At the South, we see a body of great land-owners surrounded by slaves who work for them, while they themselves live upon the profits derived from standing between the men who work to produce cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and those other men who require to consume those commodities. At the North, on the contrary, we see the whole surface of the country divided among a body of small land-owners, unequalled in the world for number, all working for themselves. On the one side we have a large body of men who desire to buy labor, and wish to have it cheaply; while on the other there is a vastly larger body that desire to sell labor, and to sell it dearly. The objects sought to be attained by the two sections of the country differ as widely as do the poles of the compass, and it can, therefore, be matter of small surprise that there is almost as great a difference in the course of policy that each desires to see pursued-the Northern portion of the Union seeking for protection against the cheap labor system of Europe, as the best mode of advancing the laborer, and the Southern portion clinging to the British free trade system as the most efficient means of cheapening labor, and enslaving the laborer.*

The men who own laborers are few in number when compared with the number of Northern men who own themselves, and seek to sell their own labor; but, as is the case in all aristocracies, the slave owners almost always work together, while the free people are divided among themselves. The consequence of this has been that the former have, generally, as the Charleston Courier boastingly informs its readers, "obtained the mastery in Congress," and have within the last twenty years "so changed its policy that its action for the most part, and with only a few exceptions, has fostered the slaveholding interest; " and this it has done at the cost of the free men of the North, who desired to be themselves the sellers of their own labor, or its products. In proof that such has been the fact, we propose now to review the votes of Congress in relation to the question of protection or non-protection to the American laborer.

The close of the great war in Europe brought with it intense agricultural distress. The foreign market for breadstuffs died away, and simultaneously therewith the domestic market that had been made by our manufacturing establishments was closed. The manufacturers themselves were ruined. The people of the South had then no doubts of the constitutionality of protection. Anxious to secure themselves against the competition *This is pure demagogueism. The South favor free trade because it is the interest of all agricultural countries every where to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. Agricultural countries have no motive in building up manufacturing districts at their expense; hence the South has wisely opposed tariffs. J. R.

of the people of India, they gladly united with those of the agricultural States in the establishment of a system of minimums upon cotton and woollen goods, and the bill for that purpose passed through the Senate with but a single dissenting vote from south of Maryland. When, in 1818, it was proposed to prolong the duration of the protection thus afforded, Baldwin of Pennsylvania, Clay of Kentucky, and Lowndes of South Carolina, were found voting together in the affirmative.

The period that followed was one of rain throughout the Middle and Northern States. Flour sold in Pittsburg at $1.25 per barrel, while iron was so high that it required seventy, if not even eighty barrels of flour to pay for a ton of bars. From day to day the farmers came more and more to appreciate the truth of Franklin's doctrines, as given in the following extract from one of his letters, dated in 1771:

"Every manufacturer encouraged in our country, makes part of a market for provisions within ourselves, and saves so much money to the country as must other. wise be exported to pay for the manufactures he supplies. Here in England it is well known and understood that, wherever a manufacture is established which employs a number of hands, it raises the value of lands in the neighboring country all around it, partly by the greater demand near at hand for the produce of the land; and partly from the plenty of money drawn by the manufacturers to that part of the country. It seems, therefore, the interest of all our farmers and owners of lands, to encourage our young manufactures in preference to foreign ones imported among us from distant countries."

From day to day it became better understood that Jefferson had been in the right when he declared that our true policy was to "place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist; "+ and thus it came that, in 1824, a new effort was made to protect the producer of food by bringing the consumer to his neighborhood. The tariff of that year was passed by the following vote:

The vote against it from the Free States was, to a great extent, from the shipping States of New England, while of the Southern vote for it a large portion came from Kentucky, always the most Northern in feeling of the Slave States. Deducting the vote of the States immediately adjoining Mason and Dixon's Line and the Ohio, it will be found that the advocates of cheap labor went almost solidly against protection.

The tariff of 1828 followed, and here the vote was as follows:

The period which followed the passage of this tariff was one of greater

Exactly; but I do not see why Massachusetts should be built up at the expense of Michigan, Iowa, and Kansas.

True; give equal rights to all; our farmers have no protection. Why should the manufacturers have superior advantages over them?

J. R.

prosperity than this country had then ever known. The revenue was so abundant that it became necessary to abolish the duties upon coffee, tea, and various other commodities consumed by the laborers of the North; and yet, notwithstanding this reduction, the public debt which, at the opening of 1829 had stood at nearly sixty millions, was finally paid off in 1834.

The advocates of cheap labor had been, as we see, almost unanimous against the passage of this act, and almost equally unanimous did they prove in denouncing it after its operation had commenced. It was the tariff of " abominations" for them, for it tended to improve the condition of the laborer, and they desired to purchase bone, muscle, and sinew in the form of laborers. Mr. McDuffie undertook to prove, by his "forty bale theory," that the South paid all the expenses of government, and he and Mr. Calhoun finally succeeded in persuading the people of South Carolina that protection was unconstitutional, and that they had a right to nullify and set at defiance the law by virtue of which the revenue was then collected; and yet Mr. Calhoun had been, himself, one of the strongest advocates for protecting the cotton of South Carolina in our markets from all interference by the cotton of India.

Then, for the first time did the people of the Union commit the serious error of recognizing the right of the minority to dictate law to the majority. South Carolina, the State that, of all others, recognizes the existence of the smallest amount of rights among her own free white men -the State that of all others exhibits in its worst form the evils of an aristocracydictated to the Union that it should fall back from the ground it had occupied, and return to a strictly horizontal tariff of twenty per cent., abandoning at once and forever all idea of protecting the free cultivators of the North in their efforts to secure to themselves a home market for the products of their labor and their land. The compromise tariff of 1833 was passed, and thus the system that had been built up at the cost of so much effort, was almost at once prostrated. Slave labor had carried the day against free labor. The men who wished to buy laborers cheaply had achieved a victory over the men who wished to sell their own labor, and to sell it dearly.

It was a great mistake, and the consequences soon became apparent. Mills and furnaces were no longer built.* Importations were large, and within four years the banks throughout the Union stopped payment. The ensuing four years were years of loss and ruin. The power to purchase foreign goods declined, and the revenue fell off so greatly that in less than nine years from the date of the final discharge of a public debt upon which we had been paying an interest of three per cent., the agents of the government were seen knocking at the doors of all the banking houses of London and Paris, Hamburg and Amsterdam, and asking for a loan at six per cent., and asking it in vain. What were the losses of the people in those awful days we need scarcely state, for they are yet fresh in the recol

At the expense of the rural districts; good that is one praiseworthy act that South Carolina has rendered the country, J. R.