may be to cultivate with us in general friendly relations,
are nevertheless by the law of their own condition
made hostile to the success and permanency of political
institutions like ours. Most humiliating may
be the embarrassments consequent upon such a condition.
Another objection, scarcely less formidable, to the
commencement of a new debt is its inevitable tendency
to increase in magnitude and to foster national extravagance.
He has been an unprofitable observer of events who
needs at this day to be admonished of the difficulties
which a government habitually dependent on loans to
sustain its ordinary expenditures has to encounter
in resisting the influences constantly exerted in favor
of additional loans; by capitalists, who enrich themselves
by government securities for amounts much exceeding
the money they actually advance—a prolific
source of individual aggrandizement in all borrowing
countries; by stockholders, who seek their gains in
the rise and fall of public stocks; and by the selfish
importunities of applicants for appropriations for
works avowedly for the accommodation of the public,
but the real objects of which are too frequently the
advancement of private interests. The known necessity
which so many of the States will be under to impose
taxes for the payment of the interest on their debts
furnishes an additional and very cogent reason why
the Federal Governments should refrain from creating
a national debt, by which the people would be exposed
to double taxation for a similar object. We possess
within ourselves ample resources for every emergency,
and we may be quite sure that our citizens in no future
exigency will be unwilling to supply the Government
with all the means asked for the defense of the country.
In time of peace there can, at all events, be no justification
for the creation of a permanent debt by the Federal
Government. Its limited range of constitutional
duties may certainly under such circumstances be performed
without such a resort. It has, it is seen, been
avoided during four years of greater fiscal difficulties
than have existed in a similar period since the adoption
of the Constitution, and one also remarkable for the
occurrence of extraordinary causes of expenditures.
But to accomplish so desirable an object two things
are indispensable: First, that the action of
the Federal Government be kept within the boundaries
prescribed by its founders, and, secondly, that all
appropriations for objects admitted to be constitutional,
and the expenditure of them also, be subjected to
a standard of rigid but well-considered and practical
economy. The first depends chiefly on the people
themselves—the opinions they form of the
true construction of the Constitution and the confidence
they repose in the political sentiments of those they
select as their representatives in the Federal Legislature;
the second rests upon the fidelity with which their
more immediate representatives and other public functionaries