Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/335

Rh form of a paper currency, it becomes irrstantly connected with civil government, and civil and religious liberty is settled by experience, to be uniformly the victim of a connexion between a lucrative monopoly, and government in any form. It is not a new experiment, therefore, which we are trying. It is only charter and state instead of church and state. Even supposing the principle of monopoly can The introduced by banking, without its infecting the civil government; the wisdom of planting some parts of our policy in a monopoly of civil rights, and others in their freedom, is still questionable. These principles are irreconcilable enemies. Mr. Adams's history of orders abundantly proves, that they are never formed in the same community, but in a state cf war; and that the war never terminates, but in a victory on. the side of one of the combatants.

If it would be dangerous to republican government, for the President to make officers of monarchists, is it safe for legislatures to make monarchists of citizens by, debt and bank stock, or by any species of monopoly? Republicans, turned into kings, bishops, lords or stockholders, are no longer republicans. Neither bishops nor bankers are exempted from the physiological qualities of man. Less than a million annually received by the officers of government, is supposed to expose them to the effect of these qualities, and excludes them from legislatures; five times as much received by bankers, is supposed to exempt them from the effect of the same qualities, and conducts them into legislatures, where they shield themselves from taxation; and from one exclusive privilege, extract another. Yet banking creates treasuries for usurpation; a division of wealth is a necessary auxiliary to a division of power; and an accumulation of the former, a stride towards rendering the latter useless. That it can also create treasuries for national defence, is the countervail urged in answer to this argument. And this countervail itself encourages the dissipation of governments; endows them with a dangerous degree of pecuniary independence of the