To this end he introduced a bill to impose impost and tonnage duties by which he believed all the objects of a national revenue could be secured without being oppressive to the country, and pursued his object day in and day out, until his bill became a law. A prompt application of the means thus acquired to the regular payment of the interest on the public debt, with a resort to others authorized in express terms by the Constitution if the impost had not proved adequate to all the objects of a national revenue, as he believed it would, and a discreet use of the power to borrow exerted in the ordinary way, accompanied by proper efforts to keep public expenditures at the lowest point consistent with an efficient public service, would in all probability have been the sum of the measures which Mr. Madison would have deemed necessary to place the public credit at the highest desirable point and to discharge all the existing obligations of the Government. They constitute all the means employed by the department now, and for several years past have proved abundantly sufficient to meet infinitely higher responsibilities, and there is in truth no conclusive reason to be found in the history of the period referred to why they would not have performed the same offices then. But these simple and usually efficacious measures did not come up to Hamilton's standard. They fell short of what he thought necessary to the actual wants of the public service, and still more so in regard to what he deemed due to the efficiency, stability, and dignity of the Government. To secure all of these objects he desired to build up a financial system which would approach to an equality with the English model after which he designed to construct it; and he believed that it was in that way only that the public necessities could be amply provided for, the public credit placed at the point which he wished it to occupy, and the respectability of the Government be properly consulted. But this plan required the adoption of measures which, it is not too much to say, he knew that neither those who framed nor those who adopted the Constitution intended to authorize. This difficulty, which to ordinary minds would have appeared insurmountable, was overcome by a device either of his own creation or, as I have for many years believed, the suggestion of another.