Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/128

118 is obvious, that a landed order, or aristocracy, cannot be established. As land itself cannot be thus balanced, the only remaining mode of effecting this indispensable object to the system of orders, is taxation. Those who receive the transfers of wealth made by taxation, and not those who supply them, must constitute the order or separate interest. A cannot be made a nobleman by giving property to B. Many conclusions ensue. The objects of paper and patronage in England, receive the benefit of the balance of property, produced by taxation—the modern mode of managing this balance ; therefore those objects, and not the titled nobility, constitute the real order or separate interest in England. Property is balanced by taxing land and labour, not by a division of land; and therefore land cannot be the basis of an aristocracy. Like all other property, it loses by the balance of property maintained by taxation; and it is the order which gains, and not that which loses, which invariably constitutes the aristocracy. An aristocracy, therefore, by the modern mode of creating it, cannot consist of a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a professional interest, or of any species of interest, that excepted which receives the property annually collected by taxation, charters and privileges. It is the share of property received, which conveys the share of power, and produces the balance of both. Corruption, charters, patronage, pensions and paper systems, are the channels through which the property annually balanced by taxation, is distributed. Therefrom the distributees derive a power, enabling them to do what a titled order would in vain attempt; to defend themselves and their king or factor, against all other interests and orders.

Let us now proceed to consider the examples in relation to his system, drawn by Mr. Adams from the governments of the middle age. Mr. Adams affects to despise theory, and to prove all his conclusions by experience. Without estimating the difference between the savage and the civilized; the superstitious and the enlightened; a city and a great country; he