These savings amount to 150,000l. a year. This is more than enough to pay the interest of all our public debts.
My countrymen, I am not trifling with you: I am serious. You feel the facts I state; you know you are poor, and ought to know, the fault is all your own. Are you not satisfied with the food and drink which this country affords? The beef, the pork, the wheat, the corn, the butter, the cheese, the cyder, the beer, those luxuries which are heaped in profusion upon your tables? If not, you must expect to be poor. In vain do you wish for mines of gold and silver. A mine would be the greatest curse that could befal this country. There is gold and silver enough in the world, and if you have not enough of it, it is because you consume all you earn in useless food and drink. In vain do you wish to increase the quantity of cash by a mint, or by paper emissions. Should it rain millions of joes into your chimnies, on your present system of expenses, you would still have no money. It would leave the country in streams. Trifle not with serious subjects, nor spend your breath in empty wishes. Reform; economize. This is the whole of your political duty. You may reason, speculate, complain, raise mobs, spend life in railing at Congress and your rulers; but unless you import less than you export, unless you spend less than you earn, you will eternally be poor.
No. XIII.
NEW YORK, DECEMBER, 1787.
To the DISSENTING MEMBERS of the late Convention of Pennsylvania.
gentlemen,
Your long and elaborate publication, assigning the reasons for your refusing to subscribe the ratification of the new Federal Constitution, has made its appearance in the public papers, and, I flatter myself, will be read throughout the United States. It will feed the flame of opposition among the weak, the wicked, the designing, and the factious; but it will make many new converts to the proposed government, and furnish the old friends of it with new weapons of defence. The very attempt to excite uneasiness and disturbance in a State, about a measure legally and constitutionally adopted, after a long and ample discussion in a convention of the people's delegates, will create suspicions of the goodness of your cause. My address to you will not be so lengthy as your publication; your arguments are few, altho your harangue is long and insidious.
You begin with telling the world, that no defect was discovered in the present confederation, till after the war. Why did you not publish the truth? You know, gentlemen, that during six years of the war, we had no confederation at all. You know that the war commenced in April, 1775, and that we had no confederation till March, 1781. You know (for some of you are men of abilities and reading) or ought to know, a principle of fear, in time of war, operates more powerfully in binding together the States which have a common interest, than all the parchment compacts on earth. Could we, then, discover the defects of our present confederation, with two years' experience only, and an enemy in our country? You know we could not.
I will not undertake to detect the falsehood of every assertion, or the fallacy of all your reasoning on each article. In the most of them the public will anticipate any thing I could say, and confute your arguments as fast as they read them. But, gentlemen, your reasoning against the new Constitution resembles that of Mr. Hume on miracles. You begin with some gratis dicta, which are denied; you assume premises which are totally false, and then reason on them with great address. Your whole reasoning, and that of all the opposers of the federal government, is built on this false principle, that the federal Legislature will be a body distinct from and independent of the people. Unless your opposition is grounded on that principle, it stands on nothing; and on any other supposition, your arguments are but declamatory nonsense.