Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/308

208 necessity for its own currency; and this extreme Lunger is misnamed volition.

The coin currency Leing expelled or drawn cut of circulation, to an extent sufficient to create a necessity for some substitute, the power possessing the right of supplying and regulatjng that substitute, can inevitably so manage it, as to enrich itself by means of that necessity. It can supply the needed currency upon the terms, and in the quantities it pleases. And if fluctuations in currency, produced and managed by chartered monopolies, can affect price or value, it follows, that through his income, his money, and his property, an individual is reached by the tax of this currency, although he never borroved or used it. Such sufferers do not exercise the least formality of volition. That the profit of banking is both a tax and an inevitable tax, is asserted by stockholders themselves, and the legislatures which grant charters. The wealth collected from a state by bank paper issued without it, is called a tribute; and the remedy resorted to is to establish the tribute at home. Tyranny, and especially pecuniary oppression, has been generally most tolerable, the farther off. It is certainly true as bankers assert, that a banking corporation in Maryland can tax Virginia by circulating its paper within that state, and of course it is also true, that a banking corporation in Virginia, can tax Virginia by the same means: the questions are, which can carry the oppression to the greatest extent; the domestick or foreign corporation; and if the former, whether a greater, will remedy a less evil? The argument in favour of repulsive banks, coincides in other points with the ideas we have expressed. Few or none of the notes coming from distant banks, admitted to have collected a tax in Virginia, were borrowed by the citizens of that state. Therefore, not the borrower, but the nation in which the notes circulate, pays the tax. If the borrower docs not pay the tax, his will or pleasure that it shall be paid by others, does not make it a voluntary tax;