To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition.  Statesmen, before they valued themselves on the relief given to the people by the destruction of their revenue, ought first to have carefully attended to the solution of this problem:—­Whether it be more advantageous to the people to pay considerably and to gain in proportion, or to gain little or nothing and to be disburdened of all contribution?  My mind is made up to decide in favor of the first proposition.  Experience is with me, and, I believe, the best opinions also.  To keep a balance between the power of acquisition on the part of the subject and the demands he is to answer on the part of the state is the fundamental part of the skill of a true politician.  The means of acquisition are prior in time and in arrangement.  Good order is the foundation of all good things.  To be enabled to acquire, the people, without being servile, must be tractable and obedient.  The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority.  The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds.  They must respect that property of which they cannot partake.  They must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.  Of this consolation whoever deprives them deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation.  He that does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched; at the same time that by his wicked speculations he exposes the fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of fortune to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the unprosperous.

Too many of the financiers by profession are apt to see nothing in revenue but banks, and circulations, and annuities on lives, and tontines, and perpetual rents, and all the small wares of the shop.  In a settled order of the state, these things are not to be slighted, nor is the skill in them to be held of trivial estimation.  They are good, but then only good when they assume the effects of that settled order, and are built upon it.  But when men think that these beggarly contrivances may supply a resource for the evils which result from breaking up the foundations of public order, and from causing or suffering the principles of property to be subverted, they will, in the ruin of their country, leave a melancholy and lasting monument of the effect of preposterous politics, and presumptuous, short-sighted, narrow-minded wisdom.