re his resources are but
partial, the want of power in the Government to compromise and release
the demand instigates to fraud as the only resource for securing a
support to his family. He thus sinks into a state of apathy, and becomes
a useless drone in society or a vicious member of it, if not a feeling
witness of the rigor and inhumanity of his country. All experience
proves that oppressive debt is the bane of enterprise, and it should be
the care of a republic not to exert a grinding power over misfortune and
poverty.

Since the last session of Congress numerous frauds on the Treasury have
been discovered, which I thought it my duty to bring under the
cognizance of the United States court for this district by a criminal
prosecution. It was my opinion and that of able counsel who were
consulted that the cases came within the penalties of the act of the
Seventeenth Congress approved 3d March, 1823, providing for the
punishment of frauds committed on the Government of the United States.
Either from some defect in the law or in its administration every
effort, to bring the accused to trial under its provisions proved
ineffectual, and the Government was driven to the necessity of resorting
to the vague and inadequate provisions of the common law. It is
therefore my duty to call your attention to the laws which have been
passed for the protection of the Treasury. If, indeed, there be no
provision by which those who may be unworthily intrusted with its
guardianship can be punished for the most flagrant violation of duty,
extending even to the most fraudulent appropriation of the public funds
to their own use, it is time to remedy so dangerous an omission; or if
the law has been perverted from its original purposes, and criminals
deserving to be punished under its provisions have been rescued by legal
subtleties, it ought to be made so plain by amendatory provisions as to
baffle the arts of perversion and accomplish the ends of its original
enactment.

In one of the most flagrant cases the court decided that the prosecution
was barred by the statute which limits prosecutions for fraud to two
years. In this case all the evidences of the fraud, and, indeed, all
knowledge that a fraud had been committed, were in possession of the
party accused until after the two years had elapsed. Surely the statute
ought not to run in favor of any man while he retains all the evidences
of his crime in his own possession, and least of all i