New York Daily Tribune

Public Debts-Their Moral Obligation: Milwaukee, Jan. 6.

To the Editor of The Tribune

Near the close of last Winter, in an article in The Weekly Tribune headed " A Word to Friends in Europe," you took occasion to give some words of advice to the true Republicans of France as to the course they should pursue on the event of their coming into power. In that article, in speaking of the National Debt, you say, "Do not repudiate it-pay it."

I should like to know the reasons which induced you to give such advice. Were I counseling the Republicans of France, I should advise them to take a course exactly opposite from that which you wish them to pursue.

Look at the circumstances of the case : For the last two hundred years, excepting two short intervals, France has been governed by tyrants who have wrung from the hard earnings of her people, the last cent that despotic power could exact. When the sums thus extorted have been insufficient to support them in their wars of ambition, and the unbounded extravagance of their mode of life, they have borrowed immense sums, promising to pay themselves, or that their successors in power would. To this contract the French People were not a party, for their rulers exercised a usurped power, therefore they are not bound by its provisions.

What principle of justice demands that the French People, on recovering their liberty, should tax themselves to pay the debt daily piling up there to pay the hireling soldiery, by whose arms they are kept enslaved? Let it not be said that they are governed by Republican rulers of their own choice; every one knows that the Constitution has been trampled in the dust; and that for the last two years despotism has reigned triumphant in France.

My position is this: When the tyrants of a Nation contract debts, the People on recovering their liberty are not bound to pay them. I hold it to be self-evident that one generation of men have neither the right nor power to borrow money and bind another generation to pay it. That, when this is sought to be done, it is the right of the succeeding generation to throw off the burden thus unjustly placed upon it.

Why should the laborers of France burden themselves with heavy taxes to pay the debts which have been handed down by the despots of two centuries? Or why should the people of the British Empire, when they shall have succeeded in driving out the Aristocracy whose iron rule now crushes them to the earth, vote to pay the immense sums borrowed by the royal fool who waged a seven years' war, in endeavoring to enslave us?

Let me not be misunderstood: I detest American repudiation. When a people's rulers, elected by Universal Suffrage, borrow money in a legal and constitutional manner: every consideration of honor and justice requires that the People should pay it-pay it while a majority of their numbers are living.

The debt contracted by our Government, in carrying on the war commenced by Polk, (a man who has done his country a greater injury than any one American that has yet lived,) I hope to see paid off within the next twelve years. I will willingly pay my share of the taxes which must be imposed in order to do it. But if it is handed down to the men of fifty years hence, I do earnestly hope that they will assert their inalienable rights and resist the imposition.

I have said enough to make my meaning clear, and will not lengthen this article. I should like to know your opinion on the question I have raised.

Respectfully yours,

JEROME COLE.