Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/310

300 new tax to the old. Such will continue to be the effect of this remedy of opposing; state paper to extraneous paper, until a state is saturated with the tax. A country is saturated with debt stock, when it can no longer pay its interest, and with bank paper, which it can no longer pay its dividends. Whilst Virginia is able to pay the dividends of her domestick stock, and the same contribution heretofore collected from her by extraneous paper, one payment will not abolish the other, but both will be made; and the creation of a bank tax to expel a bank tax, only amounts to the ingenious idea, that one lash will cure the smart of another.

The real remedy against strange bank paper is as visible as light; but it would lead to discussions, which native stock feared to encounter. If bank paper is a tax gatherer, one state may prohibit the circulation of another's paper, with as much propriety, as it could expel tax gatherers in the shape of men, commissioned by another. No disguise, change of shape, or new dress, can bestow a right to tax, where no such right exists, But native stock felt its dilemma; an expulsion of strange paper by law, because it was a tax, would have told the people by law, that native paper was also a tax. It preferred therefore the delusion of an opinion, that one tax would diminish another, as the basis of its own existence, to an inquiry, which might have terminated in the conclusion, that no legislature in the United States have a better right to tax their constituents for the benefit of banking corporations, than one state has to tux another state for the same purpose.

Into this inquiry, let us proceed; beginning with the right of Congress to tax the Union for the benefit of a bank corporation. Our arguments will be founded upon an opinion, that bank paper collects a revenue. Supposing its payment to be unavoidable, an apportionment by the census is required by our constitutional policy; allotting it to any other description of tax, a bank in each state, or some distribution of stock, is equally required by the mandate of unifornaity; and both these constitutional principles are grossly