Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/346

336 a million of dollars, and one has its money converted by charter into stock, whilst the same favour is refused to the other ; the diiference between them as to social influence, power or rights, though less visible, is really the same, as between the same portions possessing an equal quantity of land, after the lands of one portion are moulded by law into lordships, whilst no favour is granted to those of the other. However such monopolies may be decorated by the trappings of ingenuity, the artifices of fraud, or the oblations of folly, both exhibit the simple case of endowing by law a selected portion of property, either money or land, with a better income and more social power, than is derived by its holders from a far greater portion of both, not so endowed.

This argument suffers no injury from the consideration, that our constitutions have not expressly annexed political power to bank stock; because, if it naturally imbibes political power, such indirect acquisitions derived from ordinary and not conventional legislation, however tortured, can never be reconciled with the policy of the United States, if it is founded in good, just and equal moral or political principles; as to that, the difference between the treason of the sword or of the pen by which it is destroyed, will merely consist in the degrees of pain inflicted by the respective operations. Banking has only appeared to any extent in Genoa, Venice, Holland and England. Does it bring its letters of recommendation from these monarchies or aristocracies, because it has homogeniously coalesced with them? Yes, these experiments, by disclosing the fatal truth, that banking could enrich an order, awakened an order here to be enriched. It advertised itself as a talisman against poverty, and obtained proselytes both of clergy and laity, or of those to whom its promises were truths, and of those to whom they were falsehoods. Fraud ever promises riches in heaven or upon earth. and hence it has been necessary in this essay to trace it through the chief forms it has assumed, in the first, the second and third ages, to shew the innate