Chapter IX - Attempts to prove the state of affairs prosperous. Their fallacy established. Destruction of industry in Philadelphia and Pittsburg. Awful situation of Pennsylvania. 14,537 suits for debt, and 10,326 judgments confessed in the year 1819. Depreciation of real estate 115,544,629 dollars.

Summary

For a considerable time elaborate efforts were made to prove that the great mass of our citizens were highly prosperous. Even official messages, at no very distant day, announced this idea. But the veil that obscured the appalling vision of public distress is removed, and there is now no diversity of sentiment on the subject. Bankruptcy of banks—individual ruin—and sheriffs' sales to an extent never known before—the idleness of thousands of those who have no property but in the labour of their hands—resolutions of town meetings—memorials and petitions from almost every part of the middle and eastern states—messages of governors—deliberate instructions of the representative bodies in some of the states—acts of legislatures, suspending the collection of debts—and, to close the long train of calamity, the emigration of American citizens to a Spanish colony, seeking an asylum from the misery they suffer in their own country—all distinctly proclaim a deplorable state of society, which fully evinces a radical unsoundness in our policy, loudly and imperiously demanding as radical a remedy. No temporizing expedients will suffice. Nothing short of a complete and permanent protection of the national industry, so as to enable us to reduce our demands from Europe, within our means of payment, will arrest us in the career of impoverishment—and enable us to regain the ground we have unhappily lost—and take that high and commanding stand among nations, which nature and nature's God, by the transcendent advantages bestowed on us, intended we should enjoy—advantages which for five years we have so prodigally squandered.