Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/126

116 If levelism, balancing or equality was practicable, (for the words are the same, however, as Mr. Adams observes, they may be made to be adored by one party and execrated by another,) the merits of the different modes would appear by extending an idea already stated. By the system for equalising property among orders, one child gets a third of the whole, one hundred and fifty another third, and eleven millions nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, eight hundred and forty nine children, the remaining third by that for equalising property among individuals, each child would receive an equal share. The first system of equality, by a distribution excessively oppressive upon individuals, excites ambition, avarice, and universal malignity, and all the train of evil moral qualities annexed to luxury and poverty; the second system of equality, would produce all the evils of sloth and ignorance.

It is admitted that a greater portion of a nation will receive a share, by the paper and patronage system for levelling property, on account of the necessity of extending corruption to defend a fraud, relatively to the extension of knowledge; and that this multiplication of chances for a share, operates as a spur to labour and industry, us the efforts of twelve millions of persons would be more vigourously excited by the enrichment of fifty thousand than of one hundred and fifty individuals. But the more avarice is thus excited, the more oppression becomes necessary to obtain the means of its gratification; an idea furnishing the ground for a comparison between the feudal and the paper aristocracy.

Whether the reader shall hold in most detestation the system of levelling property among orders or among individuals, is unimportant to the question proposed for his consideration. And the subject is only submitted to him that he may discern the ingenuity of the first species of iniquity, in endeavouring to crouch from his eye behind the second. Conscious that it is the policy of the United States to protect property against both these modes of invading it, the