Excerpt from Mr. Hurd's Free Trade Resolution Polk, Dallas, and the tariff of its first great congressionalwork was to supplant the protective tariff of 1842 by Robert J. Walker's revenue tariff, now known as the tariff of 1846, which went into effect in 1847. The decade which followed that year was a memorable one. It gave us the gold of California, of which, in less than ten years, we mined It was during that decade that we gave Europe the first intimation of our ability to supply whatever deficiency in food might occur throughout the world. The potato rot decimated Ireland, affected the other British Islands, and spread to the Conti nent of Europe, and we exported in one year the then unprecedented amount of sixty-eight million dollars' worth of grain. The gold of California and the famine which prostrated the Irish people swelled the tide of immigration to unwonted numbers, and yet our people were not prosperous. We imported and consumed immense quanti ties of foreign goods, and as the quantity of these increased the demand for the labor of American workmen diminished. We imported coal for use in manufactories and the propulsion of locomotives. We imported rails to lay over our coal-fields and iron-beds. Wages fell to rates as low as they had been in 1820 and 1821, or in 1840 and 1841. The of California gold had fled from us as from a pestilence. We had nothing to show for our unusual exports of grain and provisions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.