Page:Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies, from the papers of Thomas Jefferson - Volume 1.djvu/360

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ed our credit, and thus checked our disposition to luxury ; and, forcing our merchants to buy no more than they have ready money to pay for, they force them to go to those markets where that ready money will buy most. Thus you see, they check our luxury, they force us to connect ourselves with all the world, and they prevent, foreign emigrations to our country, all of which I consider as ad vantageous to us. They are doing us another good turn. They attempt, without disguise, to possess themselves of the carriage of our produce, and to prohibit our own vessels from participating of it. This has raised a general indignation in America. The States see, however, that their constitutions have provided no means of counteracting it. They are therefore beginning to vest Congress with the absolute power of regulating their commerce, only reserv ing all revenue arising from it, to the State in which it is levied. This will consolidate our federal building very much, and for this, we shall be indebted to the British.

You ask what I think on the expediency of encouraging our States to be commercial ? Were I to indulge my own theory, I should wish them to practise neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand, with respect to Europe, precisely on the footing of China. We should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husband men. Whenever, indeed, our numbers should so increase, as that our produce would overstock the markets of those nations who should come to seek it, the farmers must either employ the surplus of their time in manufactures, or the surplus of our hands must be employed in manufactures, or in navigation. But that day would, I think, be distant, and we should long keep our work men in Europe, while Europe should be drawing rough materials, and even subsistence, from America. But this is theory only, and a theory which- the servants of America are not at liberty to follow. Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce. They take this from their mother country ; and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum : we wish to do it by throwing open all the doors of commerce, and knocking off its shackles. But as this cannot be done for others, unless they will do it for us, and there is no great probability that Europe will do this, 1 suppose we shall be obliged to adopt a sys tem which may shackle them in our ports, as they do us in theirs.

With respect to the sale of our lands, that cannot begin till a considerable portion shall have been surveyed. They cannot be gin to survey till the fall of the leaf of this year, nor to sell, pro bably till the ensuing spring* So that it will be yet a twelvemonth, before we shall be able to judge of the efficacy of our land office, to sink our national debt. It is made a fundamental, that the pro-