ABSTRACT
Money and arms are the material pillars of government. To rule, the sovereign must dispose of wealth and force. Unless he controls both he will not be able to rule, but will give way to whoever does have money and arms, the purse and the sword, at his command. The Founding Fathers, well aware of these realities, understood that a new government of the kind they sought would have to be equipped with both purse and sword. In granting access to the purse, the terms of the division as written into the Constitution were exceedingly generous: both central government and the states were assigned a money power that was to be concurrent and all but unrestricted. "The purse and the sword ought never to get into the same hands whether legislative or executive", as Colonel Randolph Mason put it in the debate of June 6, 1787.
