objects of liberty and happiness; and will develop in individuals the highest capacity for endurance that human nature can display. They did so in the American Revolution. The annals of no people, struggling for liberty, exhibit more of the virtues of fortitude, self-denial, and an ardent love of freedom, than ours exhibit, especially in the earlier stages of the contest. But any feelings are an unsafe and uncertain reliance for the regular and punctual operations of civil government. The fiscal concerns of a nation, left to depend principally upon the prevailing sentiments of justice, honor, and gratitude,—upon the connection between these sentiments and that passion for liberty which animated the earlier struggles for national independence,—are exposed to great hazards. If an appeal to the feelings of a people constitutes the principal ground of security for the public creditor, other feelings may intervene, which will lead to a denial of the justice of the claim; for it is the very nature of such an appeal to submit the whole question of obligation and duty to popular determination. That government alone is likely to discharge the just obligations of any people, which possesses both the power to declare what those obligations are, and the power to levy the means of payment, without a reference of either point to popular sentiment.
The history of the Confederation contains abundant proofs of the soundness of this position. At the close of the war, a debt of more than forty millions of dollars was due from the United States to various classes of creditors, and the whole of it had been contracted either by the government of the Confederation, or by its predecessors, for whose contracts the Confederation was expressly bound, by the Articles, to provide. This debt could not be discharged without a grant of internal revenues from the States, and without a grant of the power to collect other revenues from the external trade of the country. The appeal that was made by the government in order to obtain these grants was addressed almost wholly to the moral sentiments of the people of the different States; the time had scarcely arrived, although rapidly approaching, for an appeal to those interests which were involved in the surrender to the general government of the power of regulating foreign commerce;185 and consequently the arguments addressed to the sense of justice and the feeling of gratitude were answered by discussions of the propriety, justice, and reasonableness of some of the claims, for which the States were thus called upon to provide, as existing debts of the country, not without the hope, entertained in some quarters, of involving the whole in confusion and final rejection.186
The design of the framers of the revenue system of 1783 was twofold; first, to do justice to the creditors of the country, by procuring adequate power to fund the public debts; and second, to strengthen and consolidate the national government, by means of those debts and of the various interests which would be combined in the great object of their liquidation. They foresaw, on the approach of peace, that to leave these debts to be provided for by the States individually would lead to a separation of interests fatal to the continuance of the Union; but that to make the United States responsible for the whole of them would be to create a bond of union, that would be effectual and operative, after the external pressure of war, which had hitherto held the States together, should have been removed. For this purpose, they undoubtedly availed themselves of the discontents of the army, a class of the public creditors the justice of whose claims there was immediate danger in denying. There is no reason to suppose that these discontents were promoted by any one concerned in giving direction to the action of Congress. But before the crisis had been reached in the "Newburgh Addresses," it was perceived to be extremely important to prevent the army from turning away from the general government, as their debtor, to look to their respective States; and, after the imminent hazard of that moment had passed, the claims of the army were used, and used most rightfully, to impress upon the States the necessity of yielding to Congress the powers necessary to do justice.187
In the proposal of this scheme of finance, involving, as it did, a material change in the operation of the existing constitution of the country, there was great wisdom; and it was eminently fortunate that it went forth before the advent of peace, to be considered and acted upon by the States. The system of the Confederation had utterly failed to supply the means of sustaining the public credit of the Union, and the consciousness of that failure tended to produce a resolution of the Union into its component elements, the States. Men had begun to abandon the hope of paying the debts of the country; or, if they were to be paid at all, they had begun to look to the States, in their individual capacities, as the ultimate debtors, to whom at least a part of the claims was to be referred. Had the country been permitted to pass from a state of war to a state of peace, without the suggestion and proposal of a definite system for funding these debts on continental securities, the Union would at once have been exhausted of all vitality. The Confederation, left to discharge the functions which belonged to it in peace, without the power of relieving the burdens which it had entailed upon the country during the war, would have been everywhere regarded as a useless machine, the purposes of which—poorly answered in the period of its greatest activity—had entirely ceased to exist. Congress would have been attended by delegates from few of the States, if attended at all;188 and the rapid decay of the Union would have been marked by the feeble, spasmodic, and unsuccessful efforts of some of them to discharge so much of the general burdens as could have been assigned to them in severalty; the open repudiation of others; and the final confusion and loss of the whole mass of the debts, in universal bankruptcy, poverty, and disgrace.
But the comprehensive scheme of 1783, although never adopted, saved the imperfect Union that then existed from the destruction to which it was hastening. It saved it for a prolonged, though feeble existence, through a period of desperate exhaustion. It saved it, by ascertaining the debts of the country, fixing their national character, and proposing a national system for their discharge. It directed the attention of the States to the advantage and the necessity of giving up to the Union some part of the imposts that might be levied on foreign commodities, and thus led the way to that grand idea of uniformity of regulation, which was afterwards developed as the true interest of communities, which, from their geographical and moral relations, constitute in fact but one country.
It is not intended, however, in assigning this influence to the revenue system proposed in 1783, to suggest that it contained the germ of the present Constitution. It was an essentially different system. It proposed the enlargement of the powers of Congress, as they existed under the Confederation, only by the grant to the United States of the right to collect certain duties on foreign importations, for the limited period of twenty-five years, to be applied to the discharge of the debts contracted for the purposes of the war, but to be collected by officers appointed by the States, although amenable to Congress; and the levy and collection by the States of certain internal taxes, during the same limited term, for the purpose of raising certain proportionate sums, to be paid over to the United States, for the same object. So far, therefore, as this system suggested any new powers, there is a wide difference between its features and principles and those of an entire and irrevocable surrender to the Union of the whole subject of taxing and regulating foreign commerce. But the influence of this proposal upon the country, during the four years which followed, is to be measured by the evident necessities which it revealed, and by the means to which it pointed for their relief;—means which, though never applied, and, if applied, would have proved inadequate, still showed, through the period of increasing weakness in the Union, the high obligations which rested upon the country, and which could be discharged only by the preservation of the Union.
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NOTE TO PAGE 185.
ON THE HALF-PAY FOR THE OFFICERS OF THE REVOLUTION.
In Connecticut, the opposition to the plan of enabling Congress to fund the public debts arose from the jealousy with which the provision of half-pay for the officers of the army had always been regarded in that State. In October, 1783, Governor Trumbull, in an address to the Assembly declining a reëlection, had spoken of the necessity of enlarging the powers of Congress, and of strengthening the arm of the government. A committee reported an answer to this address, which contained a paragraph approving of the principles which the Governor had inculcated, but it was stricken out in the lower house. Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., who had been one of Washington's aids, thus wrote to him concerning the rejection