In the last eleven years there have been no less than three solemn inquiries into the finances of the kingdom, by three different committees of your House.  The first was in the year 1786.  On that occasion, I remember, the report of the committee was examined, and sifted and bolted to the bran, by a gentleman whose keen and powerful talents I have ever admired.  He thought there was not sufficient evidence to warrant the pleasing representation which the committee had made of our national prosperity.  He did not believe that our public revenue could continue to be so productive as they had assumed.  He even went the length of recording his own inferences of doubt in a set of resolutions which now stand upon your journals.  And perhaps the retrospect on which the report proceeded did not go far enough back to allow any sure and satisfactory average for a ground of solid calculation.  But what was the event?  When the next committee sat, in 1791, they found, that, on an average of the last four years, their predecessors had fallen short, in their estimate of the permanent taxes, by more than three hundred and forty thousand pounds a year.  Surely, then, if I can show, that, in the produce of those same taxes, and more particularly of such as affect articles of luxurious use and consumption, the four years of the war have equalled those four years of peace, flourishing as they were beyond the most sanguine speculations, I may expect to hear no more of the distress occasioned by the war.

The additional burdens which have been laid on some of those same articles might reasonably claim some allowance to be made.  Every new advance of the price to the consumer is a new incentive to him to retrench the quantity of his consumption; and if, upon the whole, he pays the same, his property, computed by the standard of what he voluntarily pays, must remain the same.  But I am willing to forego that fair advantage in the inquiry.  I am willing that the receipts of the permanent taxes which existed before January, 1793, should be compared during the war, and during the period of peace which I have mentioned.  I will go further.  Complete accounts of the year 1791 were separately laid before your House.  I am ready to stand by a comparison of the produce of four years up to the beginning of the year 1792 with that of the war.  Of the year immediately previous to hostilities I have not been able to obtain any perfect documents; but I have seen enough to satisfy me, that, although a comparison including that year might be less favorable, yet it would not essentially injure my argument.