Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/342

332 now, as did the latter some centuries past; and civil privileged sects will regard the publick happiness, as religious did then. The principle, universally agreed in the United States to be inconsistent with religious happiness, cannot advance civil. On the contrary, civil privileges are likely to produce religious misery, as religious privileges have produced civil misery, and we must probably have both privileged, civil and religious sects, or neither.

Wealth, religion and truth, ashy law established, compound a political system, of strict Athanasian orthodoxy; it does not contain three principles, but only one. And wealth, religion and truth, established by industry,, conscience and free inquiry, is the opposite system, founded also in one principle.

Wealth, established by law, violates the principle, which induced the American states to wage war with Britain. It separates the imposer from the payer of taxes. No nation would tax itself to enrich an order or separate interest. When therefore a nation is so taxed, it must proceed from the power of the order itself, which is invariably the imposer and receiver of the tax ; whilst the rest of the nation is the payer.

No interest, whose acquisitions are the effect of law, and not of labour, can pay any portion of a tax. Publick officers, who receive salaries, pay no taxes, and therefore are not allowed to impose them. If one half of these salaries were taken from them by the name of a tax, they would neither be taxed, nor entitled upon that ground to participate in the imposition of taxes; because the law only resumes what it gave, and takes nothing which it did not give it would only be a diminution of salary for services. In like manner, bankers ought not to inflict the payment of the wealth they extract, and if this wealth given by law, was resumed by law, it would only be a cessation of a naked benevolence; and a worse ground for claiming a right to impose taxes, than a diminution of a salary for services.