University of Virginia Library

TO EDMUND PENDLETON.[1]

Dear Sir,—Congress are still occupied with the
thorny subject of Vermont. Some plan for a general
liquidation and apportionment of the public debts is

also under their consideration, and I fear will be little
less perplexing. It is proposed that until justice and
the situation of the States will admit of a valuation
of lands, the States should be applied to for power to
substitute such other rule of apportioning the expenditures
as shall be equitable and practicable, and that
Commissioners be appointed by the concurrent act of
the United States and each State, to settle the
accounts between them. The scheme is not yet
matured, and will meet with many difficulties in its
passage through Congress. I wish it may not meet
with much greater when it goes down to the States.
A spirit of accommodation alone can render it unanimously
admissible; a spirit which but too little prevails,
but which in few instances is more powerfully
recommended by the occasion than the present. If
our voluminous and entangled accounts be not put
into some certain course of settlement before a
foreign war is off our hands, it is easy to see they
must prove an exuberant and formidable source of
intestine dissensions.