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. 
