Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/305

 unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness, and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kick-shaws of legitimacy. Half the resources and productive labour of the country for the last twenty years, have been sunk in this debt, and we are now called upon to make good the deficiency—how we can!—It has been shrewdly asked, whether, if every one paid a hundred per cent. income tax, the nation could flourish? And when we are told that "the war has been a customer to the country for a length of time to the amount of fifty millions a year," that is, has drained that sum from the pockets of the nation to employ the hands of the nation in producing nothing—we are at no loss to account for the consequences. A writer, whose own fault it is that we do not feel all the respect for him we could wish, has ridiculed the idea of a nation being in debt to itself, "like a tradesman to his creditors," and contends that "a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where what the one loses, the other gains." Now men and their wives do not usually pay one another the money they lose at cards; and most people will be ready enough to reduce this simile to practice, by not paying the taxes, whenever the author shall have convinced Mr. Vansittart, that it is no matter whether the money is in the hands of the people or the government, and that to save trouble it had better remain where it is. Mr. Southey, in his late pamphlet, has very emphatically described the different effects of money laid out in war and peace. "What bounds," he exclaims, "could imagination set to the welfare and glory of this island, if a tenth part, or even a twentieth of what the war expenditure has been, were annually applied in improving and creating harbours, in bringing roads to the best possible repair, in colonizing upon our waste lands, in reclaiming fens, and conquering tracts from the sea, in encouraging the liberal arts, endowing schools and churches," &c. This