Besides, the men to fight the battles, and the capital by which to feed, clothe, and furnish them the munitions of war, _must come from that generation_; and there is always great injustice in the manipulations of a great debt ostensibly incurred to obtain this capital, and the debt itself is usually in large part rather a memorial of the war than of the means by which its expenses were actually defrayed. The generation of American citizens not yet wholly passed off the stage was called on in the Providence of God to suppress a Civil War of enormous proportions, and to eradicate a social institution that was thoroughly bad; the expense of doing this was many fold enhanced by timorous counsels in the field, by class legislation in Congress, and by wretched financiering in the Cabinet; but the Debt, vast as it was, and needlessly incurred as a large portion of it was, has already in good part been paid off and must be entirely paid off by the generation that incurred it. That this great task may be thus completed, will require (1) an economical administration of the national Government; (2) an avoidance of intervention in the affairs of our Neighbors, and of entangling alliances with Foreigners; (3) a free Commercial System, under which the taxes shall be adjusted only towards the most productive revenue; and (4) a constant and onerous home Taxation. (6) The final Disadvantage of Credit is this, that it is apt to confuse the minds of men as to its own nature, from its apparent resemblance to something else, which is at bottom wholly unlike it. The people of the United States have suffered greatly from this confusion, and are likely to suffer from it still more in the time to come, both in their property and progress at home and in their good name abroad; and it becomes all good citizens, and especially all those called upon to pronounce on the Law of the Land, to know thoroughly the radical difference between a _Credit_ and a _Quittance_, and so to escape the contagious confusion that has entered and stirred up the popular, and even the judicial, mind of this country. All through the present chapter has been insisted on and illustrated the point, perhaps to the weariness of the reader, that Credit is always essentially the _Promise_ of one person to another, and that whatever is thus _Promised_ is necessarily and fundamentally different from the Promise itself. To confound those two things as if they were or could be made one and the same thing, is in thought illogical and in practice execrable. And yet it must be allowed, that there is somewhat in the nature of Credit, that makes this confusion plausible, or else it never would prevail; and also that there is something more still to make it plausible in the nature of Money, which last point can only be cleared up in the next following chapter under that title.