The stagnation which ensued was discouraging and long continued, making the years from 1857 to 1860 extremely dull and dispiriting in business circles throughout the Union.

The country was not exhausted and depleted as it was after the panic of 1837, but the business community had no courage, energy was paralyzed, and new enterprises were at a stand-still.
It soon became evident that this condition of affairs would carry the tariff questions once more into the political arena, as an active issue between parties.

Thus far, the new Republican organization had passively acquiesced in existing laws on the subject; but the general distress caused great bodies of men, as is always the case, to look to the action of the Government for relief.

The Republicans found therefore a new ground for attacking the Democracy,--holding them responsible for the financial depression, initiating a movement for returning to the principle and practice of protection, and artfully identifying the struggle against slavery with the efforts of the workingmen throughout the North to be freed from injurious competition with the cheapened labor of Europe.
This phase of the question was presented with great force in certain States, and the industrial classes, by a sort of instinct of self- preservation as it seemed to them, began to consolidate their votes in favor of the Republican party.

They were made to see, by clever and persuasive speakers, that the slave labor of the South and the ill-paid labor of Europe were both hostile to the prosperity of the workingman in the free States of America, and that the Republican party was of necessity his friend, by its opposition to all the forms of labor which stood in the wy of his better remuneration and advancement.
REPUBLICAN PARTY FAVORS PROTECTION.
The convention which nominated Mr.Lincoln met when the feeling against free-trade was growing, and in many States already deep- rooted.