ill bear; Congress complaining of the
extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of
Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most
mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions
admitting only of temporary expedients, and these expedients
generating new difficulties; Congress recommending plans to the
several States for execution, and the States separately rejudging
the expediency of such plans, whereby the same distrust of
concurrent exertions that had damped the ardor of patriotic
individuals must produce the same effect among the States
themselves; an old system of finance discarded as incompetent to
our necessities, an untried and precarious one substituted, and a
total stagnation in prospect between the end of the former and the
operation of the latter. These are the outlines of the picture of
our public situation. I leave it to your own imagination to fill
them up."

He saw more clearly, perhaps, after the experience of one session of
Congress, the true cause of all these troubles; at any rate, he was
able, in a letter written in November of that year (1780), to state it
tersely and explicitly. The want of money, he wrote to a friend, "is the
source of all our public difficulties and misfortunes. One or two
millions of guineas properly applied would diffuse vigor and
satisfaction throughout the whole military department, and would expel
the enemy from every part of the United States."

But nobody knew better than he the difficulty of raising funds except by
borrowing abroad, and that this was a precarious reliance. There must be
some sort of substitute for money. In specific taxation he had no faith.
Such taxes, if paid at all, would be paid, virtually, in the paper
currency or certificates of the States, and these had already fallen to
the ratio of one hundred to one; they kept on falling till they reached
the rate of a thousand to one, and then soon became altogether
worthless. When the estimate for the coming year was under
consideration, he proposed to Congress that the States should be advised
to abandon the issue of this paper currency. "It met," he says, "with so
cool a reception that I did not much urge it." The sufficient answer to
the proposition was, that "the practice was manifestly repugnant to the
Acts of Congress," and as these were disregarded and could not be
enforced, a mere rem