the raisins, the cake, etc., were always locked up in a pantry. All the
result, my dear sir, of an absence of free trade.

Now that you have grown up, the result is the same. You must have your
soup, and (I do not mean to be pathetic) what is soup without salt? You
must travel on the cars, but what are cars without rails? But, alas,
salt and rails are in the black list. What do you care, whether or not
TOM JONES and BILLY BROWN make money out of their salt and iron mines?
You want cheap soup and cheap riding. Then every time that you pay one
hundred dollars for your wife's dry-goods, you have the ecstatic
pleasure of knowing that you are paying fifty dollars because Mr. JOHN
ROBINSON can't make goods as cheap as the English manufacturers.

In the natural state, man is a free trader. When our good Christian
brethren give an Indian a string of beads for a buffalo-skin, the Indian
charges no custom duties. He don't want to keep beads out of his
country. When LOT swapped his wife away for a pillar of salt, the trade
was free. When the Americans traded away good ships and cargoes for
Alabama claims, not a word was said about the tariff. These, however,
are cases in which nature rather gets ahead of civilization.

See the result of the lack of free trade in our country. The brick
manufacturers must be protected, so a heavy tariff was placed on the
foreign article. Our brick men, finding that they had a soft thing,
tried to solve that conundrum which the Israelites gave up: "How do you
make bricks without straw?" They made a patent brick, built the Howard
Museum in Washington, (was it a museum or a college?) the thing tumbled
down, and a Congressional committee sat among its ruins. Poor Gen.
HOWARD is in a muddle, and wishes, from the bottom of his heart, that we
had free trade in bricks.