On the contrary, our modern expedient, which has become very general, is to mortgage the public revenues, and to trust that posterity during peace will pay off the encumbrances contracted during the preceding war; and they, having before their eyes so good an example of their wise fathers, have the same prudent reliance on their posterity, who at last, from necessity more than choice, are obliged to place the same confidence in a new posterity. But not to waste time in declaiming against a practice which appears ruinous beyond the evidence of a hundred demonstrations, it seems pretty apparent that the ancient maxims are in this respect much more prudent than the modern; even though the latter had been confined within some reasonable bounds, and had ever, in any one instance, been attended with such frugality in time of peace as to discharge the debts incurred by an expensive war. For why should the case be so very different between the public and an individual as to make us establish such different maxims of conduct for each? If the funds of the former be greater, its necessary expenses are proportionably larger; if its resources be more numerous, they are not infinite; and as its frame should be calculated for a much longer duration than the date of a single life, or even of a family, it should embrace maxims, large, durable, and generous, agreeable to the supposed extent of its existence. To trust to chances and temporary expedients is indeed what the necessity of human affairs frequently reduces it to, but whoever voluntarily depend on such resources have not necessity but their own folly to accuse for their misfortunes when any such befall them.
If the abuses of treasures be dangerous, either by engaging the state in rash enterprises or making it neglect military discipline in confidence of its riches, the abuses of mortgaging are more certain and inevitable—poverty, impotence, and subjection to foreign powers.
According to modern policy, war is attended with every destructive circumstance: loss of men, increase of taxes, decay of commerce, dissipation of money, devastation by sea and land. According to ancient maxims, the opening of the public treasure, as it produced an uncommon affluence of gold and silver, served as a temporary encouragement to industry, and atoned in some degree for the inevitable calamities of war.