Edmund Burke: “A display of our wealth before robbers is not the way to restrain their boldness or to lessen their rapacity.”

It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.

They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.

The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance.

To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition.