"I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.
And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts,
in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds as the people of England are, our people, like them,
must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts
and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes;
have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves
to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title
and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries,
and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson,
that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Sam Kercheval about reform of the Virginia Constitution, July 12, 1816; Bergh 15:39-40