ly tend to make it
a fixed point of policy in the national administration to go as far as
may be practicable in making the luxury of the rich tributary to the
public treasury, in order to diminish the necessity of those impositions
which might create dissatisfaction in the poorer and most numerous
classes of the society. Happy it is when the interest which the
government has in the preservation of its own power, coincides with a
proper distribution of the public burdens, and tends to guard the least
wealthy part of the community from oppression!

As to poll taxes, I, without scruple, confess my disapprobation of them;
and though they have prevailed from an early period in those States(1)
which have uniformly been the most tenacious of their rights, I
should lament to see them introduced into practice under the national
government. But does it follow because there is a power to lay them that
they will actually be laid? Every State in the Union has power to impose
taxes of this kind; and yet in several of them they are unknown in
practice. Are the State governments to be stigmatized as tyrannies,
because they possess this power? If they are not, with what propriety
can the like power justify such a charge against the national
government, or even be urged as an obstacle to its adoption? As little
friendly as I am to the species of imposition, I still feel a thorough
conviction that the power of having recourse to it ought to exist in the
federal government. There are certain emergencies of nations, in which
expedients, that in the ordinary state of things ought to be forborne,
become essential to the public weal. And the government, from the
possibility of such emergencies, ought ever to have the option of making
use of them. The real scarcity of objects in this country, which may
be considered as productive sources of revenue, is a reason peculiar
to itself, for not abridging the discretion of the national councils
in this respect. There may exist certain critical and tempestuous
conjunctures of the State, in which a poll tax may become an inestimable
resource. And as I know nothing to exempt this portion of the globe
from the common calamities that have befallen other parts of it, I
acknowledge my aversion to every project that is calculated to disarm
the government of a single weapon, which in any possible contingency
might be usefully employed for the general defense and security.

(I have now gone through the examina