therwise it would not have been a fair one. A
corrupt and improvident loan, like everything else corrupt or prodigal,
cannot be too much condemned; but there is a short-sighted parsimony
still more fatal than an unforeseeing expense. The value of money must
be judged, like everything else, from its rate at market. To force that
market, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous. For a small
temporary benefit, the spring of all public credit might be relaxed
forever. The moneyed men have a right to look to advantage in the
investment of their property. To advance their money, they risk it; and
the risk is to be included in the price. If they were to incur a loss,
that loss would amount to a tax on that peculiar species of property. In
effect, it would be the most unjust and impolitic of all
things,--unequal taxation. It would throw upon one description of
persons in the community that burden which ought by fair and equitable
distribution to rest upon the whole. None on account of their dignity
should be exempt; none (preserving due proportion) on account of the
scantiness of their means. The moment a man is exempted from the
maintenance of the community, he is in a sort separated from it,--he
loses the place of a citizen.

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