our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of
domiciliary vexation which once entered is scarcely to be
restrained from reaching successively every article of property
and produce. If among these taxes some minor ones fell which had
not been inconvenient, it was because their amount would not have
paid the officers who collected them, and because, if they had any
merit, the State authorities might adopt them instead of others
less approved.

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