I can not too strongly recommend to Congress the importance of husbanding all our national resources, of limiting the public expenditures to necessary objects, and of applying all the surplus at any time in the Treasury to the redemption of the debt.  I recommend that authority be vested in the Executive by law to anticipate the period of reimbursement of such portion of the debt as may not be now redeemable, and to purchase it at par, or at the premium which it may command in the market, in all cases in which that authority has not already been granted.  A premium has been obtained by the Government on much the larger portion of the loans, and if when the Government becomes a purchaser of its own stock it shall command a premium in the market, it will be sound policy to pay it rather than to pay the semiannual interest upon it.  The interest upon the debt, if the outstanding Treasury notes shall be funded, from the end of the last fiscal year until it shall fall due and be redeemable will be very nearly equal to the principal, which must itself be ultimately paid.

Without changing or modifying the present tariff of duties, so great has been the increase of our commerce under its benign operation that the revenue derived from that source and from the sales of the public lands will, it is confidently believed, enable the Government to discharge annually several millions of the debt and at the same time possess the means of meeting necessary appropriations for all other proper objects.  Unless Congress shall authorize largely increased expenditures for objects not of absolute necessity, the whole public debt existing before the Mexican war and that created during its continuance may be paid off without any increase of taxation on the people long before it falls due.

Upon the restoration of peace we should adopt the policy suited to a state of peace.  In doing this the earliest practicable payment of the public debt should be a cardinal principle of action.  Profiting by the experience of the past, we should avoid the errors into which the country was betrayed shortly after the close of the war with Great Britain in 1815.  In a few years after that period a broad and latitudinous construction of the powers of the Federal Government unfortunately received but too much countenance.  Though the country was burdened with a heavy public debt, large, and in some instances unnecessary and extravagant, expenditures were authorized by Congress.  The consequence was that the payment of the debt was postponed for more than twenty years, and even then it was only accomplished by the stern will and unbending policy of President Jackson, who made its payment a leading measure of his Administration.  He resisted the attempts which were made to divert the public money from that great object and apply it in wasteful and extravagant expenditures for other objects, some of them of more than doubtful constitutional authority and expediency.