I hear, in derogation of the value of the fact from which I draw inferences so favorable to the spirit of the people and to its just expectation from ministers, that the eighteen million loan is to be considered in no other light than as taking advantage of a very lucrative bargain held out to the subscribers. I do not in truth believe it. All the circumstances which attended the subscription strongly spoke a different language. Be it, however, as these detractors say. This with me derogates little, or rather nothing at all, from the political value and importance of the fact. I should be very sorry, if the transaction was not such a bargain; otherwise it would not have been a fair one. A corrupt and improvident loan, like everything else corrupt or prodigal, cannot be too much condemned; but there is a short-sighted parsimony still more fatal than an unforeseeing expense. The value of money must be judged, like everything else, from its rate at market. To force that market, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous. For a small temporary benefit, the spring of all public credit might be relaxed forever. The moneyed men have a right to look to advantage in the investment of their property. To advance their money, they risk it; and the risk is to be included in the price. If they were to incur a loss, that loss would amount to a tax on that peculiar species of property. In effect, it would be the most unjust and impolitic of all things,--unequal taxation. It would throw upon one description of persons in the community that burden which ought by fair and equitable distribution to rest upon the whole. None on account of their dignity should be exempt; none (preserving due proportion) on account of the scantiness of their means. The moment a man is exempted from the maintenance of the community, he is in a sort separated from it,--he loses the place of a citizen. So it is in all _taxation_. But in a _bargain_, when terms of loss are looked for by the borrower from the lender, compulsion, or what virtually is compulsion, introduces itself into the place of treaty. When compulsion may be at all used by a state in borrowing the occasion must determine. But the compulsion ought to be known, and well defined, and well distinguished; for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy of compulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain. The advantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their nature utterly unsociable. It would be to introduce compulsion into that in which freedom and existence are the same: I mean credit. The moment that shame or fear or force are directly or indirectly applied to a loan, credit perishes.