Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/303

Rh awakened the exertions of avarice and ambition, to deceive the vigilance of labour and industry; the objects of pillage- The first intricacy with which they endeavoured to hide their design, was woven of indirect taxes travelling in mazes; the second, of loaning obscured by the mist of futurity; and the third, of an artificial currency or banking, complicated by the crookedness of its operation, flattering to industry, and restrained by no natural check as a medium of fraud and tyranny. The defence of banking, "that its enormous annual acquisitions travel to it from some terra incognita, and are not drawn from the labour and property of a nation," shall be first considered.

The common nature of bank debt and funded debt, has attracted the com non appellation, stock. Existing together, their price will fluctuate in relation to national adventures, because the national ability to pay, is coextensive the sponsor for each. Peace and prosperity, cause bunk and funded stock to rise in price: war and adversity, cause both to fall. Both are heroes and patriots in safety, and cowards and traitors in danger. As the state of the nation affects both in the same way, both must affect the state of the nation in the same way. If stock did not act upon the labour and property of nations, their adventures or wealth could not react upon stock. The reaction is the same as to both funded and bank stock.

If national adventures or measures can raise or diminish the value of bank stock, it is under the same inducement as debt stock, to influence a government. Therefore one hundred millions of bank stock, will acquire as much of this influence, created by laws and not by constitutions, as one hundred millions of debt stock. Its sole object is to induce a government to enable it to tax the nation, in an indirect and complicated mode, to enrich itself; whereas the chief design of our constitutional policy, is to subject the government to the national influence to pi-event tins wicked deed. Had there been no debt stock in England, but an equal value of bank stock, that alone would have influenced