from New York, is no delinquent partisan of his; but for thirty years has always been a firm, though unmeddling, a resolute, and consistent Republican. A third of the chief contributors to the late loan is, as I have generally understood, one of the greatest capitalists of the city of New York; as little deserving of the aspersions of the honorable gentleman from that State, since he, too, unless I am much mistaken, belongs to that class of Americans who do not fall in with the political exclusiveness of that honorable gentleman, who has so boldly laid claim-I am endeavoring to show with what justice to all the capital, as well as all the virtue, and of course all the talents, of the community. A fourth of these upbraided delinquents is an inhabitant of Salem or Boston, though I am not certain whether he had an opportunity of coming in for a share of the loan of 1813, but who, at all events, I believe, subscribed most liberally to that of 1812; and who, far from meriting the distorted and wholly unfounded crimination of the honorable gentleman from New York, is like the others I have exculpated-acit izen, at the same time, of immense wealth, and sterling republicanism. There was, I think, a fifth large subscriber, a rich and respectable merchant of Baltimore, who is, I am informed, of the political denomination of those with whom the honorable gentleman from New York acts; but who, as I am not disposed to follow the illiberal example of that honorable gentleman, it gives me pleasure to add, I have always considered, instead of a delinquent, rather a high-toned partisan; but, nevertheless, a man amiable in his manners and character, and entirely exempt from any of the faults imputed by the sweeping invective of the honorable gentleman from New York.

That honorable gentleman could not have been aware of the mischief he imprecated on his own head, in common with the heads of all his other countrymen, without discrimination, when he suffered himself to be the assailant of public credit. Sir, as inestimable as I consider the American Union to American prosperity, I have no hesitation in declaring that I hold public credit to be of infinitely greater importance. It is the rock of our national salvation. It is that to which foreign Powers look as the base of our endurance. Our Union is undoubtedly essential to ourselves; but other nations care very little for our Union, and would destroy it if they could, as you, Mr. Chairman, very justly observed on this floor this morning. But as long as our public credit continues unimpaired, all nations must continue to respect us; as soon as it sinks, to despise us. Does the honorable gentleman from New York imagine-does any one suppose that every species of property would not be depreciated with the fall of public credit? Do they think, can they think, that public faith may de cline, and yet private property maintain its present estimation ? If so, they egregiously deceive themselves. Lands, houses, personal estate, money, even the circulating medium of the country,

H. OF R.

would all lose their value with the destruction or diminution of the public credit and faith; for they would cease to represent and to enable the purchase of those comforts to which money and property afford titles for the enjoyment.

Whether it would be possible, and how long, to carry on the belligerent operations of Government by loans alone, without taxes pledged for their regular and faithful redemption; and whether loans, as a system, be a good or a bad, I am not now about to inquire, though I am inclined to believe, from the abundance of money in the country, and the facility with which it has been procured, provided a high interest is offered, that perhaps for some time it would not be impracticable to obtain such loans. But then it must be in a ratio of interest always increasing, in a ratio of amount obtained always decreasing; ng; and when the economy, independently of the dignity of the Commonwealth, is taken into view, there can be no question of the necessity and advantage of taxation. You otherwise fall into the hands of brokers. You have not incurred that misfortune yet. But as your first interest was six per cent., your second seven and a half, or some fractional sum between seven and and eight, I do not know exactly what, nor is it material-so your next must be ten, after that twenty, or some such exorbitant remuneration, and so on until the interest almost equals the principal. That a system of loans, therefore, is a bad system, without a corresponding arrangement of taxes, is not to be disputed.

The science of political economy is of very modern date. It is even younger, and much less practically understood, than that of chemistry. When it is recollected that the most authoritative treatise we have had on this subject-the work of Adam Smith-did not appear longer ago than the first year of the American Revolution, and that until that time the science was very little known, even in Europe, it should not be matter of surprise that so much less is its knowledge disseminated in this country; where, though the materials for taxation are very abundant, such a variety of difficulties exists to oppose and prevent its collection. Since Smith wrote, a host of writers-Stewart, my Lord Lauderdale, Say, and Ganill, with many more, have appeared for our instruction. But after a laborious consultation of all the theories I could find, I am constrained to acknowledge that these doctors disagree so much among themselves, as to defy the adoption of any one system from all their commentaries. They are like the members of this House. Each one has his own favorite fund of finance, and each one combats all the rest with ability. I am perfectly satisfied-and that is perhaps the only satisfactory result I have derived from the examination-that as writers do not, any two of them, coincide in the principles, it will be found impossible for us to agree in the details. We shall have as many schemes as members. If each one insists on his own project, at least one hundred and sixty will be moved; and instead of concurring with the com

mittee in any general and distributed establishment, we shall, if each man be pertinacious to his own, adhere to so many incongruous and impracticable suggestions, as completely to defeat the object of the session. I do not myself approve the system reported by the Committee of Ways and Means. I think it a very bad one. Nothing but an emergency should induce me to support it. But abundant reflection has served to convince me that we must accede to such a plan as proceeds from the concentrated good sense and feelings of the House, or abandon all idea of any one at all.

While the treatises on political economy, to which I have referred, were coming to light in Europe, taxes were successively enacted, as necessity dictated their imposition, without any regard to the principles laid down for the government of financiers and legislators. The poor were taxed by the rich, who seemed to account it tax enough on themselves to be at the trouble to devise taxes for their inferiors. Systems were gradually built up in a perverse progress, begining where they ought to end, and ending where they ought to have begun. Capital was taxed first, and income reserved to the last; although it must be obvious to every understanding, that income should be taxed first, and, if ever touched at any rate, capital reserved for the last for the same reason that it is better economy to live on the interest of our money, rather than touch upon the principal. The ancient hearth tax, house tax, window tax, the excises, all preceded the heavier but juster burdens which latter years have introduced. Indeed it is not a century since, hoarding specie was the chief mean of the wealth of nations. The father of the great Frederick of Prussia, Frederick the Corporal, as he was called, by constantly hoarding up money, was enabled to leave his son eighty millions, with eighty thousand soldiers, which, with a disposition to be busy. prompted the great Frederick, as he has himself declared, to attempt those conquests which he annexed to his dominions; and which have since been wrested from his successors, who, without either the pecuniary or intellectual resources of the founder of the Prussian Kingdom, have been finally reduced to insignificance; for whoever succeeds in the present conflict no doubt the King of Prussia will not be Vicar of Bray. The success of either party will be destruction to him. The Turks, if I am not misinformed of their financial regulations, by a fundamental law of the Empire, oblige every Sultan to lay up a certain amount of the exactions he levies on his people, to meet the contingencies that may occur.

JUNE, 1813.

have submitted appear to me to contain the best plan that I am aware of. But so sensible am I of the inexpediency of infesting the House with different propositions, to the prejudice of the system reported by the committee-which can be amended in process of time whenever it proves disadvantageous-that I should not have moved my resolutions, but for the purpose of throwing them in with those of the honorable gentleman from New York. I have no doubt that, after floundering about for some time in our projects, we shall at last all feel the necessity of subscribing to the system reported by the Committee of Ways and Means.

Having thus, at more length than I fear the Committee can excuse, treated the preliminary matters I thought I might be allowed to incorporate with this tiresome inquiry, I now proceed to exhibit a view, first of what has been done in this country in this department of Government; and secondly, of what is to be done or ought to be. A retrospect of the annals of the Revolution, as far as respects taxes, will afford very little to interest or instruct us. There was at that period no metallic fund, or very little; no system either monetary or fiscal-paper was the sole resource, and that very soon fell before the ravages of depreciation. At the end of the year 1776-a year of reverses and despondency, as you know much better than I do, Mr. Chairman, for you have experience of events which I am obliged to learn from books or tradition-the depreciation was already at forty per cent. A captain's pay would not keep him in shoes, nor a major general's support an express rider. The first instalment of the first emission was procrastinated till 1779. And the taxes paid into the Treasury during fifteen months from the 1st November, 1784, to the 1st January, 1786, amounted to no more than $482,997. It is said to be a position warranted by the history of mankind, that, in the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources; to which position the financial history of our Revolution authorizes our adding another, that a generous people inhabiting a fine country will always find means equal to the pecuniary exigencies they may have to encounter. During the Revolution, in a much greater degree than now, there was always some apparently tremenduous wave ahead which looked at a distance as if it must infallibly overwhelm the vessel-butas the bark proceeded the danger diminished, and it floated at last over every wave, till arrived safe into the haven of peace and prosperity.

The second era I shall notice elapsed from 1790 to 1802. Upon the adoption of the present Constitution it was an early object to lay and build up a system of taxation. The people were just then beginning to recover from the effects of a long war, just beginning to gather the first fruits of tranquillity and good government, when, poor in purse, though exuberant enough in spirit, the interior in particular, which now abounds with precious metals, being almost destitute of a me

intruded into their hamlets. At the session of 1790-91, the Secretary of the Treasury laid before Congress what the present Chief Justice in the fifth volume of his Life of General Washington calls "an able and well digested argument," in the shape of a report, recommending, as the first step in the system, as the inauguration of taxes, a duty on domestic distilled spirits, to be collected in the mode now proposed in the resolution. I cannot help considering it a hasty and ill-advised resolution of the honorable gentleman from New

York.

I have always been taught to believe-I understood so this very morning from a gentleman whose authority there is every reason to respectthat the Constitution contemplated a countervailing arrangement of taxes; not the imposition of all on any one article of production or quarter of the country. When, therefore, after what we know to be the Constitutional contemplation, and after all the dear-bought experience we have had on this subject, an honorable gentleman moves us to lay the whole burden on one article, which will bear heavily on one quarter, and endeavors to save his own province of the country from its due share, I cannot conceal my surprise or regret that so unfair and partial a scheme should be attempted. Sir, I understood the honorable gentleman from New York to say distinctly that the land tax would be severely felt in his quarter, and the whiskey tax very little, for which reason he is desirous of raising two millions from the latter and substituting it for the former. After many days painful and successful legislation, when we have at length arrived at something like a final understanding on the land tax assessment bill, an honorable gentleman on this side of the House throws us all into confusion by an effort to undo the work we have accomplishedfor what? to overburden the agricultural districts with the payment of one-third of the sum total to be raised in one item, without any measures taken to alleviate their share of the remaining items of taxation. Such a course, I must say, I was not prepared to expect from the honorable

H. oF R.

gentleman whom I do not now see in his place, but who was formerly chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means-that all the English excises (I do not know what is included in all of them) produced during that year the prodigious sum of about twenty-seven millions sterling; to wit: ordinary, £20,899,406, and extraordinary £6,593,132. 2. The supposed morality of such a tax.

3. It was computed, together with the duties on imported spirits, to yield $877,000; just enough to pay the interest on the funded debt, which you know, Mr. Chairman, was a Treasury favorite of that day..

One historical consideration will answer all these motives to such an excise. It is true that subsequently, though I am not sure whether in precisely the same form, excises were introduced into England and have been found immensely lucrative. But so lately as 1734, in the time of Sir Robert Walpole, when that Minister was in the full culmination of place and power, an attempt to legislate excises on spirits and gin was completely defeated by the clamors and resistance of the people out of doors, and the arguments of Pulteney, Windham, Shippen, and the rest of the opposition in Parliament.

Sir Joseph Jekyll, who, I think, was master of the rolls, and moved the gin act, indulged himself on that occasion in many reflections on the morality of such taxes. But his moral results were completely reasoned down by those who took the opposite side. I do not know, for my part, what morality and taxation have to do together. Legislation, to be sure, should always look to the morals of the community; and taxation is a branch of legislation. But I have no idea that we either should or can administer to their morality under the disguise of taxes. When we moralize, let us moralize-when we tax, let us tax. I cannot indeed subscribe altogether to Mr. Burke's eloquent defence of gin, who in his "Thoughts on Scarcity" expresses himself to this effect: "As to what is said, in a physical and moral 'view, against the home-consumption of spirits, 'experience has long since taught me very little to

day. Sir, there is no objection, that I know of, to a whiskey tax. But it will be objected, and seriously too, that all the tax should not be laid on whiskey, a beverage of the poorer people, and of the agricultural States and districts; more especially when it is avowed that this unfair and unjust burden is to be substituted for a land tax, which will fall equally on all real property, and all sections of the country.

The motives to the original introduction of this unfortunate commencement of a system of internal revenue, were, I presume, three, in the mind of the first Secretary ary of the Treasury; in my humble apprehension all equally erroneous.

1. The probable productiveness of such a tax. Adam Smith says these excises produced in England, for the year ending the 5th July, 1775, the sum of £3,341,837. And I perceive by the budget of the English finances for 1812-a very interesting compilation, for which I am indebted to a

ther the thunder of the laws or the thunder of eloquence 'is hurled on gin,' always I am thunder proof. The alembic, in my mind, has furnished the world a far greater benefit and blessing, than ' if the opus maximum had been really found by chemistry, and, like Midas, we could turn every'thing into gold."

But I have no hesitation in saying, that no excise on the drink of the laboring classes will be fair, unless by the same sort of burdens you raise the price of Madeira and Claret, and Burgundy and Port, to at least one thousand dollars a pipe, and affect yourselves it would not trouble me much, though it might many gentlemen-with as great an advancement on the price of their liquors, together with as odious a domiciliary interruption and superintendence, as an excise on whiskey will prove to other people. I do not say this-I need not, with any view to popularity in Pennsylvania. I have spoken my sentiments

freely on the one side; and I may be believed, I trust, when I profess them with the same freedom on the other. Everybody must know that there is not a district in America, which would feel such a tax less than mine. Pennsylvania has no objection to being taxed, in her full proportion. I despise a popularity to be gained by advocating an exemption from taxes. But we are not to be imposed upon neither. Give us the duty upon the capacity, as the committee have reported, instead of the gallon as proposed by this resolution, and there will be no complaint. The unhappy consequences of the excise system have been sufficiently exemplified. Gentlemen see what it did in England, when first attempted there. They recollect its operation in this country in 1794 and 1798. They have witnessed the more recent operation very lately of a similar principle in the effects of the Enforcing Act, as it was called, to the Embargo-when a violent and invincible resistance to the intrusion of revenue officers into private habitations-every man's house being his castle, and not to be violated-coerced the repeal of those commercial restrictions on ourselves, which led so soon afterwards to the alternative of war with our enemies. The introduction of an excise on domestic spirits, as the, commencement of a system of taxation, was certainly unlucky, if not unwise. Such a tax ought to be blended with others. The whole plan should be a countervailing one, as I have already observed. No class, no section, no article must feel itself saddled with the whole; and in addition to that difficulty, drawn from the nature of the dominions of the United States, an excise, at all events, should be avoided, if the product desired can be got at through any other medium.

What is an excise? The hottest essay of the day, at the time of the beginning of the American Revolution, was written by Dr. Johnson, to prove "Taxation no Tyranny." Yet even Dr. Johnson defines an excise "a hateful tax levied on commodities, and adjudged, not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom the excise is paid." The Doctor had in mind, perhaps, when he composed this definition in all the vehemence of his rhetoric-he had in mind, perhaps, the excise on tea, which is said to have been his favorite drink. But the sentiment is not on that account the less applicable to an excises; and among the rest that now endeavored to be interpolated instead of a fair collection of ta duty on distilled liquors, by the capacity of the still, rather than by the gallon, which renders unnecessary an army of excisemen and superintendents.

Upon whom must this excise fall? Inquire of Adam Smith. He certainly was no Democrat; and had no view, in 1776, when he published his celebrated work, to popularity in Pennsylvania. In his third volume, at the 302d page, he thus expresses himself: "The excise upon the materials and manufacture of home-made, fermented, and spirituous liquors, is accordingly, of all the dif

JUNE, 1813.

much, perhaps principally, upon the expense of the common people."

Was, then, this excise right formerly, and would it be justifiable now? Let us look into the Federalist for an answer. In the 36th number of that excellent disquisition, it is avowed to be "a fixed point of policy 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 'more numerous classes of society." Thus, fortified with the authority, the express authority, of the great man who was placed first at the head of the Treasury Department of this country, I need not, I am confident, spend more time upon a point int which he has so clearly and ably exhibited.

Misled by delusive calculations of the great productiveness of such a tax, the Government was induced to begin with it alone. In the shape of an excise, it is objectionable absolutely. But in any shape it should be accompanied, whenever laid, with other taxes, to equalize the pressure on all classes, and throughout every detachment of the community. The southern and western, in other words, the agricultural parts of the United States, opposed its enactment; and proposed, as substitutes for it, taxes on salaries, pensions, lawyers, newspapers, and a direct land tax; for, it must always be remembered, that the minority, at the time I refer to, now the majority, uniformly proposed and maintained the direct land tax as the most simple, the most republican, and in all respects the most efficacious and unobjectionable. The excise on whiskey, nevertheless, passed the House of Representatives by a majority of thirtyfive to twenty-one.

Hopes were indulged that it would prove less intolerable in its operation than had been predicted; but in his speech, at the opening of the second Congress, General Washington acknowledges the existence of some discontents. In May, 1792, this tax was so modified as to remove or soften some of its harshest features. But unhappily the evil had then taken root, and the people unlawfully undertook its deracination. In the meanwhile all taxes were becoming unpopular, because of the odious effects of that one, which was first attempted to be levied alone. Of the insurrections in Pennsylvania I do not know that it is necessary I should take any other notice, than to express my regret, as I do most heartily, and with equal sincerity, at those distressing commotions and their impolitic causes.

On the 5th June, 1794, the President signed the act for taxing licenses to retail wine and liquor sellers; which was too much like a corollary to be palatable then, of the pestilence of the whiskey tax. And on the same day another excise, to wit, on snuff, tobacco, and refined sugar. On the 28th of May, 1796, the President's signature was affixed to a carriage tax; repealing one of a similar complexion passed at the first session of the fourth