INTRODUCTION. 75 



tional system introduced by Adam Smith. The discourse was written with 

 purity and beauty of language, and illustrated with great clearness the received 

 principles of the science. Mr. Young pointed out the evil effects of a public 

 debt upon a community, and the indispensable duty of governments to practise 

 the most rigid frugality and economy. He objected to usury laws as tending to 

 promote the very evil they were designed to eradicate, and to eleemosynary esta- 

 blishments, maintained at the public expense, as encouragements to pauperism. 

 The general scope of Col. Young's address was in harmony with the principles 

 stated by Adam Smith, though he conceded that, in the incipient stages of a do- 

 mestic manufacture, it might need and properly receive the aid of government, 

 being left, as soon as it had passed the precarious period of infancy, to that free 

 competition and that keen sighted self-interest, which he believed to be the best 

 regulators of human industry. 



An essay on credit, currency and banking, by Eleazer Lord, published in 

 1834 ; a treatise on political economy, by the reverend Alonzo Potter ; and sug- 

 gestions on the banks and the currency, published within the last year, by Albert 

 Gallatin, deserve a place among the writings of citizens of New- York, in the 

 department of political economy. These several works discuss questions which 

 yet remain subjects of political controversy, and present the various arguments 

 by which many conflicting opinions of the day are supported ; but all are distin- 

 guished by the spirit of candid inquiry, or honest conviction.* 



The convention which assembled in 1821 to revise the constitution of the 

 state, presented an occasion when many of the fundamental principles of the 

 science of government before regarded as settled, were subjected to a close and 

 searching examination. Rufus King, who had been long distinguished as a senator 

 from this state in the senate of the United States, and as a representative of the 

 United States at the court of St. James, expressed in an opening speech what 

 were probably the prevalent feelings of the convention. " Although," said he, 



* Notes on the history of the science of political economy were received from the Honorable John A. Dix, and from 

 Horace Greeley, Esq. 



