Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/339

Rh This indirect mode of stealing power from nations, compensates them with vices for the wealth it purloins. It corrupts a passion to which mankind are indebted for the most perfect state of society, and its blessings, namely, a love of property. In either extreme, like many other passions necessary to our happiness, it becomes pernicious. Enthusiastick philosophers, falling into one, by attempting to eradicate a love of property, have laid the axe to the root of society. Such attempts, though always unsuccessful, are always mischievous. By covering a love of property with odium, it unfits inexperienced young men for an association, of which this love is the chief ligament. By depreciating the motive of the sanction, the sanction itself is weakened. Accordingly, having rooted out a love of property from the mind, law and contracts lose their influence, and a community of goods, unsuccessfully attempted even by religious zeal, terminates philosophical fanaticism. Before the catastrophe arrives, pecuniary distress, begotten by a contempt of property, prevents men from being good, and is active in forming bad citizens ; and not unfrequently converts a metaphysical saint, into a practical devil. He arraigns justice of avarice ; he adjudges it to be sordid and base in a creditor to "demand payment ; he breaks contracts, because they are to be fulfilled by money ; and as most civil rights are measured by money, he tramples upon most. His theory being repugnant to the principles of society, he violates them at every step t he cannot live by rules he hates and breaks; and he is gradually moulded by the bitter expiations to which he has condemned himself by a contempt of property, into a malignant misanthrope, an abandor>ed scoundrel, or an unprincipled and ferocious demagogue, lie who dissipates his property, dissipates also his virtue and honour.

This extreme however is so far outstript by its opposite, in generating human misery, that language recoils from the horrour of a just description. Separate interests, goaded on by an avarice, awakened by unjust laws, and rendered unconscious of guilt, by the sanction of the statute book, have