twenty-five millions and a half for the year; the expenditures for the three first quarters of the year have amounted to $18,714,226.66; the expenditures of the current quarter are expected, including the two millions of the principal of the debt to be paid, to balance the receipts; so that the expenses of the year, amounting to upward of a million less than its income, will leave a proportionally increased balance in the Treasury on the 1st of January, 1827, over that of the 1st of January last; instead of $5,200,000 there will be $6,400,000. The amount of duties secured on merchandise imported from the commencement of the year till September 30 is estimated at $21,250,000, and the amount that will probably accrue during the present quarter is estimated at $4,250,000, making for the whole year $25,500,000, from which the drawbacks being deducted will leave a clear revenue from the customs receivable in the year 1827 of about $20,400,000, which, with the sums to be received from the proceeds of public lands, the bank dividends, and other incidental receipts, will form an aggregate of about $23,000,000, a sum falling short of the whole expenses of the present year little more than the portion of those expenditures applied to the discharge of the public debt beyond the annual appropriation of $10,000,000 by the act of the 3d March, 1817. At the passage of that act the public debt amounted to $123,500,000. On the 1st of January next it will be short of $74,000,000. In the lapse of these ten years $50,000,000 of public debt, with the annual charge of upward of $3,000,000 of interest upon them, have been extinguished. At the passage of that act, of the annual appropriation of ten millions seven were absorbed in the payment of interest, and not more than three millions went to reduce the capital of the debt. Of the same ten millions, at this time scarcely four are applicable to the interest, and upward of six are effective in melting down the capital. Yet our experience has proved that a revenue consisting so largely of imposts and tonnage ebbs and flows to an extraordinary extent, with all the fluctuations incident to the general commerce of the world. It is within our recollection that even in the compass of the same last ten years the receipts of the Treasury were not adequate to the expenditures of the year, and that in two successive years it was found necessary to resort to loans to meet the engagements of the nation. The returning tides of the succeeding years replenished the public coffers until they have again begun to feel the vicissitude of a decline. To produce these alternations of fullness and exhaustion the relative operation of abundant or unfruitful seasons, the regulations of foreign governments, political revolutions, the prosperous or decaying condition of manufactures, commercial speculations, and many other causes, not always to be traced, variously combine. We have found the alternate swells and diminutions embracing