Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
The receipts into the Treasury during the year ending on the 30th of
September last have exceeded $16.5 millions, which have been sufficient
to defray all the demands on the Treasury to that day, including a
necessary reimbursement of near $3 millions of the principal of the
public debt. In these receipts is included a sum of near $5.85 millions,
received on account of the loans authorized by the acts of the last
session; the whole sum actually obtained on loan amounts to $11 millions,
the residue of which, being receivable subsequent to the 30th of September
last, will, together with the current revenue, enable us to defray all the
expenses of this year.
The duties on the late unexpected importations of British manufactures will
render the revenue of the ensuing year more productive than could have been
anticipated.
The situation of our country, fellow citizens, is not without its
difficulties, though it abounds in animating considerations, of which the
view here presented of our pecuniary resources is an example. With more
than one nation we have serious and unsettled controversies, and with one,
powerful in the means and habits of war, we are at war. The spirit and
strength of the nation are nevertheless equal to the support of all its
rights, and to carry it through all its trials. They can be met in that
confidence.
Above all, we have the inestimable consolation of knowing that the war in
which we are actually engaged is a war neither of ambition nor of vain
glory; that it is waged not in violation of the rights of others, but in
the maintenance of our own; that it was preceded by a patience without
example under wrongs accumulating without end, and that it was finally not
declared until every hope of averting it was extinguished by the transfer
of the British scepter into new hands clinging to former councils, and
until declarations were reiterated to the last hour, through the British
envoy here, that the hostile edicts against our commercial rights and our
maritime independence would not be revoked; nay, that they could not be
revoked without violating the obligations of Great Britain to other powers,
as well as to her own interests.
To have shrunk under such circumstances from manly resistance would have
been a degradation blasting our best and proudest hopes; it would have
struck us from the high rank where the virtuous struggles of our fathers
had placed us, and have betrayed the magnificent legacy which we hold in
trust for future generations. It would have acknowledged that on the
element which forms three-fourths of the globe we inhabit, and where all
independent nations have equal and common rights, the American people were
not an independent people, but colonists and vassals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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