minutes of the time by our unfailing chronometer. We fear that our indiscreet revelations are in a fair way to prejudice the reader against our naval friend. This we sincerely regret; for we love Crocket, as if he had been our hero. Let the reader however take a six months' cruise on board of a man-of-war, and we think that he will feel inclined to make much allowance for sins which only involve temper on the part of Navy officers. Life on ship-board is an unnatural life. The constant contact of so many human beings crowded together within a small space is calculated to engender a fermentation, a continual irritability of disposition, against which the happiest understandings are seldom proof. Nowhere would "familiarity" so quickly "breed contempt," were it not that this artificial mode of life is propped up by the still more artificial stays of Discipline and Hierarchy. That rank thing, Rank, is like a chain passing from summit to base of the crazy edifice of Naval Discipline, and binding together the most heterogeneous elements. Each individual bears with the tyranny of his superiors, first because he must, and chiefly because he has others under himself upon whom he can vent his spleen. Thus the majestic First Luff, after his morning report to the skipper, comes out of "the presence" either radiant or morose, according as that gouty or dyspeptic chieftain has treated him well or ill-has passed a good or a bad night. Incontinently he proceeds to distribute the channels of grace or ire among the lesser reservoirs. From junior luff to middy, from middy to warrant officer, from boatswain to mates, it flows fore and aft, until the "third class boy" gets kicked under the forecastle by the last landsman on the muster roll. Yet each class has its rights, and is tenacious of them to an extent which-considering the little consequence of the matters generally involved is sometimes quite ludicrous. Midshipmen are particularly obnoxious on that score to their superiors. An old skipper was once remonstrating with one of these worthies upon the decay of the good old rules of the service. "When I was a midshipman," said he, "I had not the tenth part of your privileges." The youngster replied: "Oh! Captain, now-a-days midshipmen are gentlemen, you know." And so they are- the most technical young gentlemen in the world-regular sea-lawyers-not sharks, but tenacious and punctilious to an incredible extent. Their address in provoking their superiors and yet shying clear of a court-martial is proverbial. Once a watch officer had to send a youngster below for some slight misdemeanor. "Go below, sir," said he. Aye, aye, sir," answered the youth, touching his cap. With ready obedience he went down the hatch, and immediately reappeared on deck. "Go below, sir," repeated the watch officer in a rage. "Aye, aye, sir," replied the imperturbable midshipman, suiting the action to the word, but coming up again in an instant. In short, he carried on the same manœuvre of obeying the strict letter of the order several times, until the wrathful Lieutenant bethought himself of saying, "Go below, sir, and stay there." With so many causes of irritation, is it astonishing that Navy officers are seldom distinguished for sweetness of temper? We have tried it; try it you. [TO BE CONTINUED.] PROTECTION-FREE TRADE. MR. CAREY'S "HARMONY OF INTERESTS." THE following letter we gladly insert, although we think the author does not perceive the essential force of Mr. Carey's positions in reference to the economy of harmonizing all interests within the limits of the country, so that each may support and protect the other. His views, however, must be effective in the right direction, as the conclusions he arrives at are the same, and as they are so clearly reasoned out from his premises; and more especially, because these premises coincide so well with many of the principles from which the Free-Traders argue. We of course by no means agree with our correspondent in the supposition that the reasoning of Mr. Carey and the Protectionists will fail of any result, and we dissent entirely from his statement that our "theory has less and less favor with the public." Our correspondent's main point, however, in reference to the currency may be entirely sound, but it is far from covering, as he appears to assume, the whole ground.—ED. MR. EDITOR: Sir:-We have read with pleasure and profit the articles of Mr. Carey," Harmony of Interests," which you have noticed in the columns of your journal. We are steady advocates of "protection ;" we adopt many of his principles as true, and esteem his statistics as of immense value; still, we think Mr. Carey has not touched the leading point of the argument, and therefore we fear his reasoning, like that of the great body of the advocates of the policy of protection, will fail of any result; no impression will be made upon the public mind to control our legislation. For thirty years, the question has been debated in our halls of Congress and by the press, and it is, to us who advocate the policy of "protection," a melancholy fact, that our theory has less and less favor with the public. One of three things is therefore true either experience is not in accordance with the reason of things; or we do not present the question logically to the public mind; or the common sense of society, with all the light of long debate, is incompetent to decide, either from reason or experience, what is the best national policy. The first cannot be true; the last we will not admit; the other, therefore, must be the reason for the present condition of public opinion. The position of Mr. Carey is, that "Commerce is King" that commerce, as now conducted, is an unproductive employment, wasting labor and capital in transporting commodities between distant producers and consumers, who should be located together. Granted but what gives King Commerce his power; what enables him thus to govern and control the operations of society for his own interest, and to their so obvious loss; why do men thus waste their energies at his bidding in these unprofitable ways? There is no law compelling them thus to act, and they would not thus act if there was not an apparent advantage in the course they adopt. Individuals and communities, in America at least, are free to pursue the policy they deem best; no law restrains us in our avocations. The object of society in the prosecution of its industrial pursuits is, the largest supply of its wants. In all countries, but especially in America, agriculture is the great interest, occupying the mass of the population. If now the agriculturist finds, that with a given quantity of wheat he can obtain at market a larger quantity of iron from England than he can from Pennsylvania, why should he not do so? He will say to the iron maker, You have the freight and duty, some twenty-five per cent. on the cost, in your favor; if, under these circumstances, you are unable to give me but seventy-five pounds of iron, while I can obtain one hundred pounds from Europe, I can see no reason why I should take the smaller quantity for your benefit; you say I shall be a gainer by the operation, but I am unable to discover the advantage, and it seems more reasonable that you, who are the few, should take the smaller quantity of wheat, than that we, who are the many, should take the smaller quantity of iron; your theory of bringing the producer and consumer together will result in either case, and the interest of the majority ought to govern; again, if the government does not get the revenue from the European in the form of duties, I must pay it in direct taxes, since the government must be sustained. If the iron-maker replies that the high price of labor prevents his giving more than the seventy-five pounds, the agriculturist will answer that wheat as well as iron is the product of labor; if the price of labor is too high to make iron, why is it not too high to make wheat? I compete in the open market with the European wheatgrower, and why cannot you compete with the iron-maker? You live in a country where subsistence is abundant and cheap, where there is an abundance of iron ore, coal, limestone, and labor; you pay no taxes comparatively; what is the reason you cannot compete in your own market with the Englishman, who makes iron in a country where subsistence is scarce and dear, where taxes consume half the product of his toil, and to reach your market he must transport his iron across the Atlantic, and after paying the taxes of his own government, must pay a duty of twenty per cent. to support ours? If the iron-maker alleges again that labor is too high, the agriculturist will reply that labor alone does not determine the price of commodities. Labor alone produces commodities, but these commodities must not only repay the price of labor, but must sustain the whole of individual and national expenditure. In Europe, kings, armies, navies, lords, bishops, and paupers, to say nothing of lazy fund-holders, all live from the products of labor; and although the share of labor may be small, the price of commodities must be equal to the burden of taxation and expenditure which they sustain; you ought therefore to sell at European prices, since your remuneration will then exceed that of the European by all the difference of taxation. But, replies the iron-maker, there is so much poverty and want in Europe, will you reduce us to their condition? The agriculturist will reply, European poverty does not make iron cheap but dear; every worker in England must not only sustain himself, but his pauper neighbor, since paupers, while they earn nothing, must be fed and clothed from the labor of those who toil; this will reduce the quantity of commodities, but certainly not their price; if there were no paupers in England, but all labored, the quantity of products would be greater and their price less, and you less able to sell in market. Thus, at every point, the "free-trade" party, if he is competent, can meet and refute all the usual arguments for "protection;" and though all our experience demonstrates, what Mr. Carey has so clearly proved by his statistics, that the periods of "protection" have been periods of prosperity, and those of "free trade" periods of adversity, still we fail in demonstrating, by logical argument, the truth of our position. Yet ours is the true position; experience is a better guide than theory or even logic, and we will endeavor to state the argument in what we deem its true and only form-in a way in which our experience and our logic shall correspond to each other. Nations, as well as individuals, exchange commodities, not directly, or by barter, but through the medium of money or currency; that is, we do not give wheat for iron, but both for money, which is the measure of their value. It is essential then that the moneys or currencies of the parties exchanging should be the equivalent of each other, otherwise there may be apparent, but no real equity in the exchange. If the currencies of Europe and America are equivalent, then "protection" is not defensible; if they are not, which we maintain is the truth, then it is defensible, not for the reasons generally given, nor for those of Mr. Carey, but for other, better and sufficient ones. Value is the relation of supply and demand. The value of things is in their uses; neither money nor other things have any value except that of use. The use of money is to measure and exchange values, and for this purpose one quantity, provided it be fixed and permanent, is as good as another; ten pounds of gold are, for the purpose of money, as good as a hundred, because ten pounds would be just as useful as a hundred. Gold is used as the measure of value primarily because it is a substance whose quantity is fixed: it has collateral qualities, its permanence and divisibility, but fixedness of quantity is its principal excellence. All our ideas of intrinsic value are absurd; a sufficient quantity of gold for the use to which it is applied has value; more than that would add nothing to its aggregate value; more of any commodity than our uses require, only reduces the larger to the value of the smaller quantity. this money of credit into gold at the option of the holder, thereby laying the foundation for all the financial evils which afflict modern society. But this law of convertibility is found to be sometimes impracticable; in Great Britain, for a whole generation, it was set aside by the force of circumstances, and twice in the United States, within forty years, the same event has occurred, and by common consent the evil of an unconvertible currency has been submitted to, as the only tolerable mode of arranging the equities of contracts and exchanges. In France, until quite recently, a currency almost entirely metallic has been used, and of course prices are low; in Great Britain, since the resumption of specie payments by the Bank, a currency of nearly equal parts of metal and credit has been in use, and there prices are higher than in France; by the recent recharter of the Bank of Eng The whole quantity of money in use determines the quantity which shall indicate the value, by the price, of the commodity in any given exchange. If the quantity of money be large, price will be high; if the quantity be small, price will be low. Price is, therefore, simply the relation which exists between the quantity of money in use, and the number and value of the commodities to be exchanged, and the price of any given commodity is the relation which that commodity bears to the whole number and value of the commodities to be exchanged, and the quantity of money by which the exchanges are to be effected. This principle, which we denominate the Law of Price, is the key to the whole subject; it is a self-land, the relation between the metal of the evident proposition, so plain and obvious that it needs no illustration. Price has no relation to value except to indicate its quantity. Exchanges may be effected without the intervention of price, as when a loaf of bread is given for a piece of meat; an exchange of commodities has occurred, but nothing is known of the price of either, because price refers only to money; and here, we repeat, it is evident, that in order to any equitable exchanges, the moneys, currencies, or measures of value of the parties exchanging, must be equivalents of each other, must indicate the quantity of value in each of the commodities exchanged by the same rule, like the measures of length, weight, or capacity. Gold is assumed to be the measure of value in the commercial world. Were it really the measure, the currencies of the world would be nearly equivalents, differing only in the cost and risk of transport from the point of production to that of consumption; but modern society has substituted credit in the place of gold, and this credit exists in such different quantities, in the different countries, as to destroy all the equivalent relations of their currencies, and of course, to disturb the equity of exchanges made in conformity to these varying currencies. But while they have substituted credit for gold, they insist upon retaining gold as the ultimate measure of value, and compel, by the force of law, the convertibility of Bank and its issues of credit as currency has been fixed by law, and the action of that Bank governs the financial action of the whole kingdom. In the United States, the whole subject is left to the discretion of the bankers, who, like other men, act with exclusive reference to their own advantage. By the law of the currency, whatever performs its functions acquires the power of reproducing itself in the form of interest, like capital; credit as currency earns interest equally with capital, and therefore, acting for his own interest, the banker increases the amount of the credit currency to the utmost extent practicable, and the quantity of currency in the United States, as compared with that of Europe, is probably two to one. What we call dollars are really only half dollars, and of course all price in the United States is, as compared with Europe, doubled. That blind giant, the public, while suffering under the miseries of a disturbed currency, has evinced the instincts of reason by laying hold of the ideas of "hard money" and "sub-treasuries," but, quieted by returning prosperity and ease, the present condition of things entirely meets the general wish, and the banker deserves praise that he has not acceded to all the clamor of the public for more money. This expansion of price, arising out of the expansion of the currency, renders our market the one to which all the surplus products of the world naturally tend, as that in which price is highest; while our exports, from the same cause, are confined almost entirely to those articles, cotton, rice, and tobacco, to which climate and soil afford a "protection" more certain and permanent than that of the tariff. A mere modicum of food is exported to England, where the excessive burden of taxation upon land enables us to dispose of a small quantity of our surplus. Our own labor is prevented from supplying our own wants, because its price, like that of commodities, is increased by our expanded currency, and not because the supply of labor is inadequate. All the gold we can obtain from California and other sources is insufficient to meet the demand occasioned by excessive imports, and to make up the deficiency, we export all the forms of public credit created by national, State, and corporate loans. Some of our shrewdest statesmen admire the wisdom of this course. We are, in fact, like a nation of miserable spendthrifts, living by running in debt to Europe, and are rapidly approaching the verge of bankruptcy. The failure of a crop of cotton, (the failure of the potato crop came near to bankrupting Great Britain,) the suspension of gold from California, or the exhaustion of public credit-all, or either of these events, will plunge us again into the condition of 1837-8. Few persons are aware how entirely the finances of the United States are dependent upon the great products of Southern industry. The North and West, embracing three fifths of the population of the nation, the greatest consumers of foreign products, have nothing whatever of their own to exchange for them; were those articles, the staple products of the South, which furnish eighty millions of exports, to fail, or should any event occur to disturb the steady flow of commerce, by which they are transferred to Europe to meet our imports, while they are paid for, beyond the consumption of foreign products by the South, by the products of Northern and Western industry which find there their market, and the profits of Northern trade and navigation, our whole financial structure would fall into ruin and confusion, our currency of credit would perish, and the nation be driven again to suspension. This expanded currency is, however, an organic law of society in the United States; it ramifies through all the fibres of the body politic; it is the essential interest, to which | all other economic interests must give place. In a community like ours, where, owing to the absence of capital and our universal intelligence and activity, credit is in such general use, the utmost care must be exercised in the management and preservation of the currency, since it determines the power of every obligation, national, corporate, and individual, with the force of law; every disturbance of it is fatal, and only the most gradual change, which will enable us to grow into the altered condition-altered it should be- -can be either safe or tolerable. The currency of the nation, therefore, and not its manufactures, is the interest which requires "protection," not for any natural reasons, but for those which are, like itself, merely artificial; reasons which have their origin in the defective system which has become an integral portion of our national polity; from the errors of our ideas in relation to the nature and uses of money—from the mistaken opinion so general in society that price and value are equivalents. The currency is emphatically a national interest, not a sectional one. South, North, East, West, agriculture, manufactures, commerce-all districts and all classes of the nation are alike interested in its preservation; but especially the industrial, the poorer classes, whose great commodity, labor, will perish, and leave them defenseless whenever the interests of the currency are injured, or its bulk suddenly diminished; the rich may outlive the storm which will sweep the accumulations of industry into their coffers, but the industrious, the poor, must suffer. The South, it is true, has suffered more severely from the defects of the currency than the North: they have attributed their difficulties to the tariff, but that is only remotely the cause; had no tariff ever existed, the currency would never have been expanded. Their difficulties, like those of the North, have their origin in the currency; the products of Northern industry find their market at home, but the South have bought in a dear market and sold in a cheap one. Their lands, their negroes, their supplies of almost every description are purchased at home, with an expanded currency of credit; their products, the bulk of which find their market in Europe, have been sold in a restricted currency of metal. It is a law of commerce, that the market which takes the bulk of any commodity, fixes the price for |