division of the continent. It may conduce to a
more perfect understanding of subsequent transactions, to present, in
this place, a sketch of those charges.

[Sidenote: Strictures on the conduct of administration, with a view of
parties.]

It was alleged that the public debt was too great to be paid before
other causes of adding to it would occur. This accumulation of debt
had been artificially produced by the assumption of what was due from
the states. Its immediate effect was to deprive the government of its
power over those easy sources of revenue, which, applied to its
ordinary necessities and exigencies, would have answered them
habitually, and thereby have avoided those burdens on the people which
occasioned such murmurs against taxes, and tax gatherers. As a
consequence of it, although the calls for money had not been greater
than must be expected for the same or equivalent exigencies, yet
congress had been already obliged, not only to strain the impost until
it produced clamour, and would produce evasion, and war on their own
citizens to collect it, but even to resort to an _excise_ law, of
odious character with the people, partial in its operation,
unproductive unless enforced by arbitrary and vexatious means, and
committing the authority of the government in parts where resistance
was most probable, and coercion least practicable.

That the United States, if left free to act at their discretion, might
borrow at two-thirds of the interest contracted to be paid to the
public creditors, and thus discharge themselves from the principal in
two-thirds of the time: but from this they were precluded by the
irredeemable quality of the debt; a quality given for the avowed
purpose of inviting its transfer to foreign countries. This transfer
of the principal when completed would occasion an exportation of three
millions of dollars annually for the interest, a drain of coin without
example, and of the consequences of which no calculation could be
made.

The banishment of coin would be completed by ten millions of paper
money in the form of bank bills, which were then issuing into
circulation. Nor would this be the only mischief resulting from the
institution of the bank. The ten or twelve per cent, annual profit
paid to the lenders of this paper medium would take out of the pockets
of the people, who would have had, without interest, the coin it was
banishing. That all the capital employed in paper speculation is
bar