The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid
chiefly by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic
comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and
incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may
be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what
mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States?
These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the
Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish
the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits, and
to apply such a surplus to our public debts as places at a short day
their final redemption, and that redemption once effected the revenue
thereby liberated may, by a just repartition of it among the States and
a corresponding amendment of the Constitution, be applied in time of
peace to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and
other great objects within each State. In time of war, if injustice by
ourselves or others must sometimes produce war, increased as the same
revenue will be by increased population and consumption, and aided by
other resources reserved for that crisis, it may meet within the year
all the expenses of the year without encroaching on the rights of
future generations by burthening them with the debts of the past. War
will then be but a suspension of useful works, and a return to a state
of peace, a return to the progress of improvement.

I have said, fellow-citizens, that the income reserved had enabled us
to extend our limits, but that extension may possibly pay for itself
before we are called on, and in the meantime may keep down the accruing
interest; in all events, it will replace the advances we shall have
made. I know that the acquisition of Louisiana had been disapproved by
some from a candid apprehension that the enlargement of our territory