In his famous speech on American taxation in the House of Commons fifteen years before, Mr.Burke asserted that it was "not the weight of the duty, but the weight of the preamble, which the Americans were unable and unwilling to bear." The tax actually imposed was not oppressive, but the preamble implied the power to levy upon the Colonies whatever tax the British Government might deem expedient, and this led to resistance and to revolution.

The force of the preamble was now turned against Great Britain.

She saw that the extent to which the principle of protective duties might be carried was entirely a matter of discretion with the young Republic whose people had lately been her subjects and might now become her rivals.

The principle of protecting the manufactures and encouraging the navigation of America had been distinctly proclaimed in the first law enacted by the new government, and was thus made in a suggestive and emphatic sense the very corner-stone of the republican edifice which the patriots of the Revolution were aiming to construct.
The opinions of Mr.Madison as thus shown in the first legislation by Congress are the more significant from the fact that he belonged in the Jeffersonian school, believed in the strictest construction of granted power, was a zealous Republican in the partisan divisions of the day, and was always opposed to the more liberal, or, as he would regard them, the more latitudinarian views of the Federal party.

In regard to the protection and encouragement of manufactures there seemed to be no radical difference between parties in the early period of the government.