Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/267

Rh with cultivating the land, and payinsg its rent under the name of interest. So if a nation, whose lands are worth one hundred millions, borrows and funds that sum, it has only sold or mortgaged its lands to stockholders up to their value, who receive the rent in the name also of interest or dividends. It has not added to its wealth, or drawn any thing from futurity, but only turned its land into money. And between the nation and a private debtor is this difference; that an individual who sells his estate, receives and uses the purchase money ; but a nation which turns its estate or any portion of it into money by borrowing, loses both the money and estate.

But the evil is not terminated with this loss. If an age is supposed to consist of twenty years, and it borrows at five per centum, it loses the principal, first by its perversion from publick use to the gratification of private avarice or ambition ; secondly, by its entire repayment during the borrowing age; and moreover all individuals who exist above twenty years, pay their proportion of the principal borrowed for each cycle of additional existence. Many will pay, three hundred per centum for anticipation in this-way only, but few will receive any tiling from it, and all subject their descendants for ever to a repayment of the whole principal for every revolution of the stockjobbing orb, without a possibility of their deriving any benefit from it: To these requitals of an existing generation, for attempting the impossibility of enriching itself at the expense of its posterity, a long catalogue of the same complexion might be added; such as the number and expense of new offices, produced by borrowing, not only to expend the principal, but to collect and pay the interest ; and the oppression inevitably resulting from dividing a nation into inimical interests. These arguments are bottomed upon the concession of a similitude between renting land and borrowing money, whereas the true similitude from which we ought to draw our conclusions in regard to funding systems, would be one between