their voluntary consent; and that this consent ought to be voluntary in fact as well as in name.”  It followed that “every proposal of a change ought to be in the shape of an appeal to their interests; but not to their necessities.”  Hamilton then went into details of a funding loan, in which various options were offered to the creditors, including land grants in part payment, and conversion in whole or in part into annuities, several sorts of which were offered.  He submitted estimates of how the various plans would work out in practice, and he concluded that the annual revenue which would be required to enable the government to meet its obligations under the scheme and also to maintain its current service would amount to $2,239,163.09, a sum that could be readily provided.

There could not have been a more striking contrast than there was between the humiliating conditions which actually existed and the grand results which Hamilton designed and confidently expected.  The ardent and hopeful tone of his plan, conceived in apparently desperate circumstances, is very marked.  He declared:  “It cannot but merit particular attention that among ourselves the most enlightened friends of good government are those whose expectations are the highest.  To justify and preserve their confidence; to promote the increasing respectability of the American name; to answer the calls of justice; to restore landed property to its due value; to furnish new resources both to agriculture and commerce; to cement more closely the union of the States; to add to their security against foreign attack; to establish public order on the basis of a liberal and upright policy—­these are the great and invaluable ends to be secured by a proper and adequate provision at the present period for the support of public credit.”

All these great objects were indeed attained, but Hamilton’s anticipation of them was at the time regarded as either a pretext made to cajole Congress or else merely an ebullition from his own sanguine nature not to be taken too seriously by sensible people.  Senator Maclay of Pennsylvania regarded Hamilton’s plans as wildly extravagant in their conception and iniquitous in their practical effect.  In his opinion, Hamilton had “a very boyish, giddy manner, and Scotch-Irish people could well call him a ‘skite.’” Jackson of Georgia exposed to the House the folly of Hamilton’s proposals by pointing out that a funded debt meant national decay.  He mentioned England as “a melancholy instance of the ruin attending such engagements.”  To such a pitch had the “spirit of funding and borrowing been carried in that country” that its national debt was now “a burthen which the most sanguine mind can never contemplate they will ever be relieved from.”  France also was “considerably enfeebled and languishes under a heavy load of debt.”  He argued that by funding the debt in America “the same effect must be produced that has taken place in other nations; it must either bring on national bankruptcy, or annihilate her existence as an independent empire.”