Edmund Burke: “You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country.”

They cannot raise supplies; but they can raise mobs.

Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.

They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.

Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of…