There must be some impulse besides public spirit to put private interest
into motion along with it. Monied men ought to be allowed to set a value
on their money; if they did not, there could be no monied men. This
desire of accumulation is a principle without which the means of
their service to the state could not exist. The love of lucre, though
sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is
the grand cause of prosperity to all states. In this natural, this
reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the
satirist to expose the ridiculous: it is for the moralist to censure
the vicious; it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and
cruel; it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion,
and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he finds
it, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections
on its head. It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases
where he is to make use of the general energies of nature, to take them
as he finds them.