Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton is doing what he often did best: turning anxiety into architecture. The line reads calm, almost clinical, but it carries a hard-edged warning. Nations, he suggests, do not outgrow need. They merely trade one set of pressures for another. The “usual progress of things” is a rhetorical shrug that doubles as a claim of inevitability: if you think the crisis ends once independence is declared, you’re already behind.

Intent matters here. Writing in the early republic’s shadow-world of debt, weak federal authority, and unreliable revenue, Hamilton is arguing against the comforting fantasy that America can remain perpetually underfunded yet permanently safe. His subtext is that resources are not a stockpile you can hoard and admire; they are something you must continuously mobilize. If necessities will “be found” equal to resources, then any surplus is temporary and any complacency is political malpractice.

The wording also smuggles in a theory of state power. “Necessities” is doing heavy lifting: it can mean defense, infrastructure, creditworthiness, administration - the unglamorous machinery of sovereignty. By framing needs as naturally expanding to match capacity, Hamilton normalizes robust fiscal tools (taxation, public credit, a stronger federal apparatus) as not just useful but structurally required.

It’s a maxim aimed at anti-federalists and small-government romantics: you can distrust government all you like, but the world will keep sending invoices. Hamilton’s cynicism is pragmatic, not poetic. The republic will pay for existence one way or another; better to choose the system than be chosen by emergencies.