My opinion, then, is, that public contributions ought only to be raised by the public will.  By the judicious form of our Constitution, the public contribution is in its name and substance a grant.  In its origin it is truly voluntary:  not voluntary according to the irregular, unsteady, capricious will of individuals, but according to the will and wisdom of the whole popular mass, in the only way in which will and wisdom can go together.  This voluntary grant obtaining in its progress the force of a law, a general necessity, which takes away all merit, and consequently all jealousy from individuals, compresses, equalizes, and satisfies the whole, suffering no man to judge of his neighbor or to arrogate anything to himself.  If their will complies with their obligation, the great end is answered in the happiest mode; if the will resists the burden, every one loses a great part of his own will as a common lot.  After all, perhaps, contributions raised by a charge on luxury, or that degree of convenience which approaches so near as to be confounded with luxury, is the only mode of contribution which may be with truth termed voluntary.

I might rest here, and take the loan I speak of as leading to a solution of that question which I proposed in my first letter:  “Whether the inability of the country to prosecute the war did necessitate a submission to the indignities and the calamities of a peace with the Regicide power?” But give me leave to pursue this point a little further.

I know that it has been a cry usual on this occasion, as it has been upon occasions where such a cry could have less apparent justification, that great distress and misery have been the consequence of this war, by the burdens brought and laid upon the people.  But to know where the burden really lies, and where it presses, we must divide the people.  As to the common people, their stock is in their persons and in their earnings.  I deny that the stock of their persons is diminished in a greater proportion than the common sources of populousness abundantly fill up:  I mean constant employment; proportioned pay according to the produce of the soil, and, where the soil fails, according to the operation of the general capital; plentiful nourishment to vigorous labor; comfortable provision to decrepit age, to orphan infancy, and to accidental malady.  I say nothing to the policy of the provision for the poor, in all the variety of faces under which it presents itself.  This is the matter of another inquiry.  I only just speak of it as of a fact, taken with others, to support me in my denial that hitherto any one of the ordinary sources of the increase of mankind is dried up by this war.  I affirm, what I can well prove, that the waste has been less than the supply.  To say that in war no man must be killed is to say that there ought to be no war.  This they may say who wish to talk idly, and who would display their humanity at the expense of their honesty or their understanding.  If more lives are lost in this war than necessity requires, they are lost by misconduct or mistake:  but if the hostility be just, the error is to be corrected, the war is not to be abandoned.