e Treasury unemployed in any way is impracticable; it
is, besides, against the genius of our free institutions to lock up in
vaults the treasure of the nation. To take from the people the right of
bearing arms and put their weapons of defense in the hands of a standing
army would be scarcely more dangerous to their liberties than to permit
the Government to accumulate immense amounts of treasure beyond the
supplies necessary to its legitimate wants. Such a treasure would
doubtless be employed at some time, as it has been in other countries,
when opportunity tempted ambition.

To collect it merely for distribution to the States would seem to be
highly impolitic, if not as dangerous as the proposition to retain it
in the Treasury. The shortest reflection must satisfy everyone that to
require the people to pay taxes to the Government merely that they may
be paid back again is sporting with the substantial interests of the
country, and no system which produces such a result can be expected to
receive the public countenance. Nothing could be gained by it even if
each individual who contributed a portion of the tax could receive back
promptly the same portion. But it is apparent that no system of the kind
can ever be enforced which will not absorb a considerable portion of
the money to be distributed in salaries and commissions to the agents
employed in the process and in the various losses and depreciations
which arise from other causes, and the practical effect of such an
attempt must ever be to burden the people with taxes, not for purposes
beneficial to them, but to swell the profits of deposit banks and
support a band of useless public officers.

A distribution to the people is impracticable and unjust in other
respects. It would be taking one man's property and giving it to
another. Such would be the unavoidable result of a rule of equality
(and none other is spoken of or would be likely to be adopted), inasmuch
as there is no mode by which the amount of the individual contributions
of our citizens to the public revenue can be ascertained. We know
that they contribute _unequally_, and a rule, therefore, that would
distribute to them _equally_ would be liable to all the objections
which apply to the principle of an equal division of property. To make
the General Government the instrument of carrying this odious principle
into effect would be at once to destroy the means of its usefulness and
change the character designe