Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/313

Rh terms, by the instrument in which they are used, restricts legislative power by a definition, far short of an unfettered imagination, licensed to pronounce whatever comports with its fancy, its interest or its plots, to be serviceable to the publick. It unequivocally dissevers the privileges or emoluments allowed to publick services, from whatever may be sold, or transmitted to relations, like bank stock. And expounds these terms, as much as their equivalents, "general welfare," according to their original unsophisticated intention.

The governments of the union, Massachusetts and Virginia, have granted banking charters, conveying saleable, transferrable and descendible exclusive privileges and emoluments; and have thus opened by precedent a way to every conceivable power, by usurping the mother of all powers, that of distributing wealth. This maybe given to foreigners, whether plebeians, nobles or kings, and held both in peace and in war, as rewards "for publick services" or "for common defence and general welfare," by bank "exclusive privileges and emoluments." The word "common," requires a membership with the community, and the king, nobility, clergy and paper aristocracy of England, holding bank stock in America, in a war between England and the United States, must therefore be considered, as rendering publick services, and advancing our defence and welfare, to bring the appropriation of money to their use by the bank law, within the meaning of this expression. If such fictions are able to overturn constitutional principles, the idea of a constitution capable of restraining legislatures, is itself a fiction. It is admitted that this part of our reasoning is of little weight. If banking is a publick benefit, constitutional prohibitions ought not to deprive the publick of that benefit; only the constitutions ought to be amended to come at it. Banking ought therefore to be considered, as it affects nations morally and politically, and not by any verbal test. But it cannot be overlooked, that although banking was