There was nothing in this tending to encourage manufactures.
If the United States were prepared to manufacture to the whole amount of their wants, the importation of all rival articles might be prohibited.

But this they were not prepared to do.

Their manufactures must advance by slow degrees; and they were not to enter into a measure of this kind, for the purpose of retaliating on a nation which had not commercially injured them.
The resolutions then were adapted to the encouragement neither of the navigation, nor the manufactures of the United States, but of a foreign nation.

Their effect would obviously be to force trade to change its natural course, by discriminations against a nation which had in no instance discriminated against the United States, but had favoured them in many points of real importance.

By what commercial considerations could such a system be recommended?
That it would be attended with great immediate inconveniences must be admitted; but for these, ample compensation, it had been said, was to be found in its remote advantages.