of the states, separately, are incumbered with considerable debts, which are an excresence of the late war. But this cannot happen again, if the proposed system be adopted; and when these debts are discharged, the only call for revenue of any consequence, which the state governments will continue to experience, will be for the mere support of their respective civil lists; to which, if we add all contingencies, the total amount in every state ought to fall considerably short of a million of dollars.
If it cannot be denied to be a just principle, that in framing a constitution of government for a nation, we ought, in those provisions which are designed to be permanent, to calculate, not on temporary, but on permanent causes of expense; our attention would be directed to a provision in favour of the state governments for an annual sum of about 1,000,000 dollars; while the exigencies of the union could be susceptible of no limits, even in imagination. In this view of the subject, by what logic can it be maintained, that the local governments ought to command, in perpetuity, an exclusive source of revenue for any sum beyond that which has been stated? To extend its power further, in exclusion of the authority of the union, would be to take the resources of the community out of those hands which stood in need of them for the public welfare, in order to put them into other hands which could have no just or proper occasion for them.
Suppose then, the convention had been inclined to proceed upon the principle of a repartition of the objects of revenue, between the union and its members in proportion to their comparative necessities; what particular fund could have been selected for the use of the states, that would not either, have been too much or too little; too little for their present, too much for their future wants? As to the line of separation between external and internal taxes, this would leave to the states, at a rough computation, the command of two-thirds of the resources of the community to defray from a tenth to a twentieth of its expenses; and to the union, one third of the resources of the community to defray from nine-tenths to nineteen
