ng to ascertain whether there exists, in
fact, any such necessity as we hear every day asserted, to furnish a
miserable pretext for counselling us to surrender at discretion our
conquests, our honor, our dignity, our very independence, and, with it,
all that is dear to man. It will be more than sufficient for that
purpose, if I can make it appear that we have been stationary during the
war. What, then, will be said, if, in reality, it shall be proved that
there is every indication of increased and increasing wealth, not only
poured into the grand reservoir of the national capital, but diffused
through all the channels of all the higher classes, and giving life and
activity, as it passes, to the agriculture, the manufactures, the
commerce, and the navigation of the country?

The Finance Committee which has been appointed in this session has
already made two reports. Every conclusion that I had before drawn, as
you know, from my own observation, I have the satisfaction of seeing
there confirmed by that great public authority. Large as was the sum by
which the committee of 1791 found the estimate of 1786 to have been
exceeded in the actual produce of four years of peace, their own
estimate has been exceeded during the war by a sum more than one third
larger. The same taxes have yielded more than half a million beyond
their calculation. They yielded this, notwithstanding the stoppage of
the distilleries, against which, you may remember, I privately
remonstrated. With an allowance for that defalcation, they have yielded
sixty thousand pounds annually above the actual average of the preceding
four years of peace. I believe this to have been without parallel in all
former wars. If regard be had to the great and unavoidable burdens of
the present war, I am confident of the fact.

But let us descend to particulars. The taxes which go by the general
name of Assessed Taxes comprehend the whole, or nearly the whole,
domestic establishment of the rich. They include some things which
belong to the middling, and even to all but the very lowest classes.
They now consist of the duties on houses and windows, on male servants,
horses, and carriages. They did also extend to cottages, to female
servants, wagons, and carts used in husbandry, previous to the year
1792,--when, with more enlightened policy, at the moment that the
possibility of war could not be out of the contemplation of any
statesman, the wisdom of Parliament confined them t