Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/302

292 after an accesslon of knowledge or a division of property, has liberated them from the direct feudal slavery. This treacherous quality of money was perceived by the Spartan legislator, without discerning any remedy for it, but that of destroying its inestimable benefits. It is clear that nations, by giving any species of currency to an order or interest, will give it a title to every species of service from the multitude; that the revival by law of a title to such services through the intervention of a currency, is a substantial revival of the feudal system; that a legal currency possesses a power of destroying, with wonderful rapidity, the division of property which destroyed that system; and that without a very considerable division of property, a free government cannot exist. The remedy for these evils, which Lycurgus did not discern, is to prohibit legal distributions of money or currency, those excepted rendered unavoidable by government, and to leave their distribution to industry.

Even the precious metals have furnished to the contrivers of pillage and oppression a medium for extracting indirectly from nations, a far greater proportion of their labour, than they could ever be made to pay directly by the feudal or any other regimen: but the impossibility of multiplying these metals at pleasure, inflicted a considerable cheek upon this fraudulent perversion of so useful a representative of property. An artificial currency is subject to no such check, and possesses an unlimited power of enslaving nations, if slavery consists in binding a great number to labour for a few. Employed, not for the useful purpose of exchanging, but for the fraudulent one of transferring property, currency is converted into a thief and a traitor, and begets, like an abuse of many other good things, misery instead of happiness.

Mankind soon discovered that money was easily converted into a medium for oppression as well as for commerce, and hence arose nearly as strong a dislike to heavy taxes in money as in kind; it being clearly seen that labour and property were transferred by money. This plain truth.