Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/318

308 elusive charter, as districts and inhabitants are in Russia, or branches of commerce in England. If a monopoly of the wine trade, cannot be chartered to a corporation, will credit, which covers every branch of commerce, admit of a state of monopoly?

The value of credit, us property, appears evidently in the price it sells for. A nation, by giving away its credit, loses what Pennsylvania sold at six per centum. By erecting corporations to monopolize or expel its specie, to make room for their credit, it loses the use of tins specie worth six per centum more. And necessity then compels it to buy of these corporations the credit it gave to then, at the price of ten or twelve per centum upon their stock. These Kerns shew that credit is either property, or a machine for transferring property, more effectual than that made of hereditary and exclusive wisdom. Both machines have been invented for this purpose. The hereditary magnifies the defects incident to human government in its best form, to hide its own greater vices. The credit machine, in strict imitation of this example, seizes upon the errours of paper money, as reproaches against national credit; and hides under them its own greater aptitude to shrink from danger, and also its capacities for corrupting governments and plundering nations. Of the bad features in the face of paper money, corporation credit makes two masks, one to hide its own hideousness, the other to hide the benefits of national credit.

If all the banks in the United States circulate fifty millions of paper dollars, five millions of real property will thereby be collected. And if national credit, instead of corporation credit, had issued the same sum in the mode successfully practised in Pennsylvania, a revenue of five millions would have been received instead of being paid, making a difference of ten millions annually to the nation. Are these great sums of wealth no property? If they are property, to whom do they belong? If they belong to any body, can they be transferred by laws and charters, under a policy, which considers property as sacred?