The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit.

The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.

To presume a want of motives for such contests . . . would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements . . . are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and slow gradations.

The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge right or make good decision.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.