The Importance of a General Union

In America, it is evident that we must a long time depend for the means of revenue chiefly on such duties. It cannot admit of a serious doubt that this state of things must rest on the basis of a general union. The separate states or confederacies would be necessitated by mutual jealousy to avoid temptations to that kind of trade by the loneness of their duties. And personal property is too precarious and invisible a fund to be laid hold of in any other way than by the imperceptible agency of taxes on consumption.