The first was in the year 1786. On that
occasion, I remember, the report of the committee was examined, and
sifted and bolted to the bran, by a gentleman whose keen and powerful
talents I have ever admired. He thought there was not sufficient
evidence to warrant the pleasing representation which the committee had
made of our national prosperity. He did not believe that our public
revenue could continue to be so productive as they had assumed. He even
went the length of recording his own inferences of doubt in a set of
resolutions which now stand upon your journals. And perhaps the
retrospect on which the report proceeded did not go far enough back to
allow any sure and satisfactory average for a ground of solid
calculation. But what was the event? When the next committee sat, in
1791, they found, that, on an average of the last four years, their
predecessors had fallen short, in their estimate of the permanent taxes,
by more than three hundred and forty thousand pounds a year. Surely,
then, if I can show, that, in the produce of those same taxes, and more
particularly of such as affect articles of luxurious use and
consumption, the four years of the war have equalled those four years of
peace, flourishing as they were beyond the most sanguine speculations, I
may expect to hear no more of the distress occasioned by the war.
The additional burdens which have been laid on some of those same
articles might reasonably claim some allowance to be made.
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