So it is in all taxation.  But in a bargain, when terms of loss are looked for by the borrower from the lender, compulsion, or what virtually is compulsion, introduces itself into the place of treaty.  When compulsion may be at all used by a state in borrowing the occasion must determine.  But the compulsion ought to be known, and well defined, and well distinguished; for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy of compulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain.  The advantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their nature utterly unsociable.  It would be to introduce compulsion into that in which freedom and existence are the same:  I mean credit.  The moment that shame or fear or force are directly or indirectly applied to a loan, credit perishes.

There must be some impulse, besides public spirit, to put private interest into motion along with it.  Moneyed men ought to be allowed to set a value on their money:  if they did not, there could be no moneyed men.  This desire of accumulation is a principle without which the means of their service to the state could not exist.  The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all states.  In this natural, this reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the satirist to expose the ridiculous,—­it is for the moralist to censure the vicious,—­it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and cruel,—­it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he finds it, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections on its head.  It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases, where he is to make use of the general energies of Nature, to take them as he finds them.

After all, it is a great mistake to imagine, as too commonly, almost indeed generally, it is imagined, that the public borrower and the private lender are two adverse parties, with different and contending interests, and that what is given to the one is wholly taken from the other.  Constituted as our system of finance and taxation is, the interests of the contracting parties cannot well be separated, whatever they may reciprocally intend.  He who is the hard lender of to-day to-morrow is the generous contributor to his own payment.  For example, the last loan is raised on public taxes, which are designed to produce annually two millions sterling.  At first view, this is an annuity of two millions dead charge upon the public in favor of certain moneyed men; but inspect the thing more nearly, follow the stream in its meanders, and you will find that there is a good deal of fallacy in this state of things.