of martial matters as the ancient Indians: And this single position,
closely attended to, will unanswerably prove, that the present time
is preferable to all others. The argument turns thus--at the conclusion
of the last war, we had experience, but wanted numbers;
and forty or fifty years hence, we should have numbers,
without experience; wherefore, the proper point of time,
must be some particular point between the two extremes,
in which a sufficiency of the former remains, and a proper
increase of the latter is obtained: And that point of time
is the present time.

The reader will pardon this digression, as it does not properly
come under the head I first set out with, and to which I again return
by the following position, viz.

Should affairs be patched up with Britain, and she to remain the governing
and sovereign power of America, (which, as matters are now circumstanced,
is giving up the point entirely) we shall deprive ourselves of the very means
of sinking the debt we have, or may contract. The value of the back lands
which some of the provinces are clandestinely deprived of, by the unjust
extension of the limits of Canada, valued only at five pounds sterling
per hundred acres, amount to upwards of twenty-five millions,
Pennsylvania currency; and the quit-rents at one penny sterling per acre,
to two millions yearly.

It is by the sale of those lands that the debt may be sunk,
without burthen to any, and the quit-rent reserved thereon,
will always lessen, and in time, will wholly support the yearly
expence of government. It matters not how long the debt is in
paying, so that the lands when sold be applied to the discharge