APPENDIX 249 



" That your petitioner witnesses the investment of such 

 capital, in a financial point of view, by individuals in 

 certain trunk lines, as being beneficial, as well to the 

 country as to the shareholders, inasmuch as they (the 

 latter) get good interest for their money, and are thereby 

 enabled, in some measure, to counteract the evil they 

 have produced ; while others, many of them, some that 

 have passed, and others now before your Honourable 

 House, originating in false premises, and j)rojected by 

 artful and designing men, are calculated to give rise to a 

 spirit of gambling, successful for a while, but which must 

 ultimately involve, if they have not already done so, the 

 ruin of thousands who have, under some specious 

 pretexts, consented to become their dupes ; such sys- 

 tematic adventurous schemes being derogatory to the 

 national character, subversive of that safe and healthy 

 state AV'hich the monetary transactions of a great com- 

 mercial country should ever enjoy, incompatible with the 

 industrious habits, as well as prejudicial to the social, 

 moral, and religious obligations, of the people. 



"That your petitioner has long and deeply thought of 

 and deplored the late dilapidated state of our finances, 

 the state of the nation — her debt, her revenue, her 

 expenditure, her resources — as well as our present un- 

 wholesome system of taxation ; and your petitioner, with 

 his faculties unimj^aired, and the same zeal to serve his 

 country as he had when he first jDut his foot on board of 

 a man-of-war, is prepared to prove before any Com- 

 mittee your Honourable House shall appoint, upon 

 certain returns being produced, that such a revenue 

 can be raised from the present mode of travelling as shall 



