strengthen the expectation. Enterprises for improving the public communications by cutting canals, opening the obstructions in rivers, and erecting bridges, have received very material aid from the same source.
When the manufacturing capitalist of Europe shall advert to the many important advantages which have been intimated in the course of this report he can not but perceive very powerful inducements to a transfer of himself and his capital to the united States. Among the reflections which a most interesting peculiarity of situation is calculated to suggest, it can not escape his observation, as a circumstance of moment in the calculation that the progressive population and improvement of the United States insure a continually increasing domestic demand for the fabrics which he shall produce, not to be affected by any external casualties or vicissitudes.
But, while there are circumstances sufficiently strong to authorize a considerable degree of reliance on the aid of foreign capital, toward the attainment or the object in view, it is satisfactory to have good grounds of assurance, that there are domestic resources, of themselves adequate to it. It happens that there is a species of capital, actually existing with the United States, which relieves from all inquietude, on the score of want of capital. This is the funded debt.
The effect of a funded debt, as a species of capital, has been noticed upon a former occasion; but a more particular elucidation of the point seems to be required, by the stress which is here laid upon it. This shall, accordingly, be attempted.
Public funds answer the purpose of capital, from the estimation in which they are usually held by moneyed men; and, consequently, from the ease and dispatch with which they can be turned into money. This capacity of prompt convertibility into money, causes a transfer of stock to be, in a great number of cases, equivalent to a payment in coin. And where it does not happen to suit the party who is to receive, to accept a transfer of stock, the party who is to pay is never at a loss to find, elsewhere, a purchaser of his stock, who will furnish him, in lieu of it, with the coin of which he stands in need.
Hence, in a sound and settled state of public funds, a man possessed of a sum in them, can embrace any scheme of business which offers, with as much confidence as if he were possessed of an equal sum in coin.
This operation of public funds as capital is too obvious to be denied; but it is objected to the idea of their operating as an augmentation of the capital of the community, that they serve to occasion the destruction of some other capital to an equal amount.
The capital, which alone they can be supposed to destroy, must consist of the annual revenue, which is applied to the payment of interest on the debt and to the gradual redemption of the principal; the amount of the coin, which is employed in circulating the funds, or, in other words, in effecting the different alienations which they undergo.
But the following appears to be the true and accurate view of this matter:
First. As to the point of the annual revenue requisite for payment of interest and redemption of principal.
