as much of the privation immediately as can easily be borne, and, only when any further burden would distress or cripple them too much, to provide for the remainder by mortgaging their future income. It is an excellent maxim to make present resources suffice for present wants; the future will have its own wants to provide for. On the other hand, it may reasonably be taken into consideration that, in a country increasing in wealth, the necessary expenses of government do not increase in the same ratio as capital or population; any burden, therefore, is always less and less felt; and, since those extraordinary expenses of government which are fit to be incurred at all are mostly beneficial beyond the existing generation, there is no injustice in making posterity pay a part of the price, if the inconvenience would be extreme of defraying the whole of it by the exertions and sacrifices of the generation which first incurred it.
§ 2. Not desirable to redeem a national Debt by a general Contribution.
When a country, wisely or unwisely, has burdened itself with a debt, is it expedient to take steps for redeeming that debt? In principle it is impossible not to maintain the affirmative.
Two modes have been contemplated of paying off a national debt: either at once by a general contribution, or gradually by a surplus revenue. The first would be incomparably the best, if it were practicable; and it would be practicable if it could justly be done by assessment on property alone. If property bore the whole interest of the debt, property might, with great advantage to itself, pay it off; [pg 600] since this would be merely surrendering to a creditor the principal sum, the whole annual proceeds of which were already his by law, and would be equivalent to what a land-owner does when he sells part of his estate, to free the remainder from a mortgage. But property, it need hardly be said, does not pay, and can not justly be