Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/325

Rh than the chymical. One proposes to make gold out of something; the other out of nothing.

If England held all the bank stock of the union, the furnace of this new species of alchymy would burst, "as if a bolt of thunder had been driven through" the states, and all its promises would vanish, "in fame," not before the refined satire of Ben Johnson, but before common sense. It would be instantly seen, that England, the stockholder, was enriched by the dividends, and America taxed and impoverished by the notes. By filling the place of England with three or four thousand native and foreign stockholders, the place of the people is not altered. Such of them as are legislators, will vote upon political questions, exactly as England would, if she held our stock and could legislate for us. The ground which sustains this argument, is that upon which banking has spread from state to state: namely, that taxes, and not gold for publick benefit, are forged in the furnace of this new alchymy. Whether taxes are repealed by transferring their appropriation from A to B, from a foreign country to a native legislator, is left to the sagacity of the reader.

Patronage is an instrument by which governments corrupt a faction to take part with them against nations, and thus gradually acquire more power than the people ever gave. If this instrument is obtained by foreign conquest, as in the acquisition of India by England, the people still suffer by the unconstitutional power it confers; it is infinitely more calamitous to a nation, when gotten by domestick operations.

Had the governments of the United States, bestowed upon themselves and their partisans, offices to the value of five millions annually, the patronage would have been the same with that created by banking; which welds the corporation to the government, and the government to the corporation, against the people, like sinecure offices to the same amount. For this vast and boundless mode of acquiring power, there is no allowance in any constitution. It is a great weight,