7081. PROTECTION, Petitions for.—
I
observe you [Congress] are loaded with petitions
from the manufacturing, commercial
and agricultural interests, each praying you
to sacrifice the others to them. This proves
the egoism of the whole and happily balances
their cannibal appetites to eat one another.
* * * I do not know whether it is any
part of the petitions of the farmers that our
citizens shall be restrained to eat nothing but
bread, because that can be made here. But
this is the common spirit of all their petitions.—
To Hugh Nelson.
Ford ed., x, 156.
(M.
1820)
