5625. NATIONAL CURRENCY, Borrowing fund.—[further continued] .
Although a century of
British experience has proved to what a
wonderful extent the funding on specific redeeming
taxes enables a nation to anticipate
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 quantities 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 are now 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 * * * we must make up our minds to
suffer yet longer before we can get right.
The misfortune is, that in the meantime, we
shall plunge ourselves in unextinguishable
debt, and entail on our posterity an inheritance
of eternal taxes, which will bring our
government and people into the condition of
those of England, a nation of pikes and
gudgeons, the latter bred merely as food for the
former.—
To James Monroe. Washington ed. vi, 409.
Ford ed., ix, 497.
(M.
Jan. 1815)
