success to the task of reducing the proposed duties and to securing
modifications of various portions of the bill.

In 1820, when the tariff recommended at the previous session was about to
come before Congress, Mr. Webster was not in public life. He attended,
however, a meeting of merchants and agriculturists, held in Faneuil Hall in
the summer of that year, to protest against the proposed tariff, and he
spoke strongly in favor of the free trade resolutions which were then
adopted. He began by saying that he was a friend to manufactures, but not
to the tariff, which he considered as most injurious to the country.

"He certainly thought it might be doubted whether Congress would
not be acting somewhat against the spirit and intention of the
Constitution in exercising a power to control essentially the
pursuits and occupations of individuals in their private
concerns--a power to force great and sudden changes both of
occupation and property upon individuals, _not as incidental to the
exercise of any other power, but as a substantial and direct
power_."

It will be observed that he objects to the constitutionality of protection
as a "direct power," and in the speech of 1814, in the portion quoted in
italics, he declared against any general power still more forcibly and
broadly. It is an impossible piece of subtlety and refining, therefore, to
argue that Mr. Webster always held consistently to his views as to the
limitations of the revenue power as a source of protection, and that he put
protection in 1828, and subsequently sustained it after his change of
position, on new and general constitutional grounds. In the speeches of
1814 and 1820 he declared expressly against the doctrine of a general power
of protection, saying, in the latter instance:--