Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/334

324 enlave it. than if the same sum was drawn from their conquered enemies; because toiling for others, and receiving the earnings of others without toil, is a double momentum towards these results; whereas a tribute paid by foreigners, as debasing only by luxury, and not by tyranny also, is a single one. Profit without labour, will be preferred to labour with loss. The effort of the best informed will be to get out of the nation into the separate interest, to avoid the labour with loss, and to gain the profit without labour. Nations have for three thousand years been doomed to oppression, by an opinion that they had not capacity to govern themselves: are they doomed to suffer it for another three thousand years, from an opinion that they are unable to give themselves a paper currency, if it should be useful?. In the first ease, the nation is persuaded that it is a fool, but that a few individuals are wise; in the second, that it is a pauper, but that a few individuals are rich. The last idea, is even ludicrous, as the sole object of banking is to tax a rich nation to enrich poor individuals.

After a patient trial of charter privilege and monoply for three thousand years, almost at the moment they are rejected as poison to civil and religious liberty, we are told that they are wholesome aliment for commerce. It is not surprising that self interest should tell us this; but it is, that self-interest should believe it, and recommence the fairest, most patient, and most expensive experiment which was ever made. After another tedious term of rueful experience, monopoly will again exclaim, that it confesses itself to be pernicious, when applied to commerce and credit, just as it now confesses the same thing, in relation to religion and civil power, but that in some new form it is a blessing; and the experiment ought then, with as much reason as now, to be recommenced.

It is to elude the discovery of its enmity to civil and religious liberty, that monopoly confesses the change in its old forms, hoping under the candour of this confession, to get into operation in a new form. Admitted in the stupendous