147. ADMINISTRATION, Summary of Jefferson's first.—
To do without a land
tax, excise, stamp tax and the other internal
taxes, to supply their place by economies,
so as still to support the government properly,
and to apply $7,300,000 a year steadily
to the payment of the public debt; to discontinue
a great portion of the expenses on
armies and navies, yet protect our country
and its commerce with what remains; to
purchase a country as large and more fertile
than the one we possessed before, yet ask
neither a new tax, nor another soldier to be
added, but to provide that that country shall
by its own income, pay for itself before the
purchase money is due; to preserve peace
with all nations, and particularly an equal
friendship to the two great rival powers,
France and England, and to maintain the
credit and character of the nation in as high
a degree as it has ever enjoyed, are measures
which I think must reconcile the great body
of those who thought themselves our enemies;
but were in truth only the enemies
of certain Jacobinical, atheistical, anarchical,
imaginary caricatures, which existed only in
the land of the raw head and bloody bones,
beings created to frighten the credulous. By
this time they see enough of us to judge our
characters by what we do, and not by what
we never did, nor thought of doing, but in
the lying chronicles of the newspapers.—
To Timothy Bloodworth. Washington ed. iv, 523.
(W.
Jan. 1804)
