to make any considerable progress in the payment of our debts, or that the situation of foreign affairs will, for any long time, allow them leisure and tranquillity for such an undertaking.30 What then is to become of us? Were we ever so good Christians and ever so resigned to Providence, this, methinks, were a curious {p94} question, even considered as a speculative one, and what it might not be altogether impossible to form some conjectural solution of. The events here will depend little upon the contingencies of battles, negotiations, intrigues, and factions. There seems to be a natural progress of things which may guide our reasoning. As it would have required but a moderate share of prudence when we first began this practice of mortgaging to have foretold, from the nature of men and of ministers, that things would necessarily be carried to the length we see, so now that they have at last happily reached it, it may not be difficult to guess at the consequences. It must, indeed, be one of these two events—either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation. It is impossible they can both subsist after the manner they have been hitherto managed, in this as well as in some other nations.
There was indeed a scheme for the payment of our debts which was proposed by an excellent citizen, Mr. Hutchinson, above thirty years ago, and which was much approved of by some men of sense, but never was likely to take effect. He asserted that there was a fallacy in imagining that the public owed this debt, for that really every individual owed a proportional share of it, and paid, in his taxes, a proportional share of the interest, beside the expenses of levying these taxes. Had we not better, then, says he, make a proportional distribution of the debt among us, and each of us contribute a sum suitable to his property, and by that means discharge at once all our funds and public mortgages? He seems not to have considered that the laborious poor pay a considerable part of the taxes by their annual consumptions, though they could not advance at once a proportional part of the sum required; not to mention that property in money and stock in trade might {p95} easily be concealed or