It is, therefore, not from treasuries and
mines, but from the food of your unpaid armies, from the blood withheld
from the veins and whipped out of the backs of the most miserable of
men, that we are to pamper extortion, usury, and peculation, under the
false names of debtors and creditors of state.
The great patron of these creditors, (to whose honor they ought to erect
statues,) the right honorable gentleman,[9] in stating the merits which
recommended them to his favor, has ranked them under three grand
divisions. The first, the creditors of 1767; then the creditors of the
cavalry loan; and lastly, the creditors of the loan in 1777. Let us
examine them, one by one, as they pass in review before us.
The first of these loans, that of 1767, he insists, has an indisputable
claim upon the public justice. The creditors, he affirms, lent their
money publicly; they advanced it with the express knowledge and
approbation of the Company; and it was contracted at the moderate
interest of ten per cent. In this loan, the demand is, according to him,
not only just, but meritorious in a very high degree: and one would be
inclined to believe he thought so, because he has put it last in the
provision he has made for these claims.
I readily admit this debt to stand the fairest of the whole; for,
whatever may be my suspicions concerning a part of it, I can convict it
of nothing worse than the most enormous usury.
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