disastrous calamities, and this can be almost imperceptibly accomplished
by gradually funding the national circulation in securities that may be
made redeemable at the pleasure of the Government.

Our debt is doubly secure--first in the actual wealth and still greater
undeveloped resources of the country, and next in the character of our
institutions. The most intelligent observers among political economists
have not failed to remark that the public debt of a country is safe in
proportion as its people are free; that the debt of a republic is the
safest of all. Our history confirms and establishes the theory, and is,
I firmly believe, destined to give it a still more signal illustration.
The secret of this superiority springs not merely from the fact that in
a republic the national obligations are distributed more widely through
countless numbers in all classes of society; it has its root in the
character of our laws. Here all men contribute to the public welfare and
bear their fair share of the public burdens. During the war, under the
impulses of patriotism, the men of the great body of the people, without
regard to their own comparative want of wealth, thronged to our armies
and filled our fleets of war, and held themselves ready to offer their
lives for the public good. Now, in their turn, the property and income
of the country should bear their just proportion of the burden of
taxation, while in our impost system, through means of which increased
vitality is incidentally imparted to all the industrial interests of
the nation, the duties should be so adjusted as to fall most heavily
on articles of luxury, leaving the necessaries of life as free from
taxation as the absolute wants of the Government economically
administered will justify. No favored class should demand freedom from
assessment, and the taxes should be so distributed as not to fall unduly
on the poor, but rather on the accumulated wealth of the country. We
should look at the national debt just as it is--not as a national