our channel all its good will. This will be worth the
million of dollars the repairs of their conflagrations will cost us.
I hope that to preserve this weather-gage of public opinion, and to
counteract the slanders and falsehoods disseminated by the English
papers, the government will make it a standing instruction to
their ministers at foreign courts, to keep Europe truly informed of
occurrences here, by publishing in their papers the naked truth always,
whether favorable or unfavorable. For they will believe the good, if we
candidly tell them the bad also.

But you have two more serious causes of uneasiness; the want of men and
money. For the former, nothing more wise or efficient could have been
imagined than what you proposed. It would have filled our ranks with
regulars, and that, too, by throwing a just share of the burthen on the
purses of those whose persons are exempt either by age or office; and it
would have rendered our militia, like those of the Greeks and Romans,
a nation of warriors. But the go-by seems to have been given to your
proposition, and longer sufferance is necessary to force us to what is
best. We seem equally incorrigible in our financial course. Although a
century of British experience has proved to what a wonderful extent the
funding on specific redeeming taxes enables a nation to anticipitate
in war the resources of peace, and although the other nations of Europe
have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest
of the same object, yet we still expect to find, in juggling tricks and
banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing, and in sufficient
quantity to meet the expenses of a heavy war by sea and land. It is
said, indeed, that money cannot be borrowed from our merchants as from
those of England. But it can be borrowed from our people. They will give
you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt
trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will
give them a paper-promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for
common circulation. But you say the merchants will not take this paper.
What the people take the merchants must take, or sell nothing. All these
doubts and fears prove only the extent of the dominion which the
banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens, and
especially of those inhabiting cities or other banking places; and this
dominion must be broken, or it will break us. But h