Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/347

Rh similitude of these forms to each other, and the inconsistency of all, with the civil policy of the United States. The subject ought to be fairly explained, that the nation may judge whether monopoly shall destroy its constitutional principles, or these principles, monopoly. If circumstances propelled the United States, like France, into a form of government too free or too honest for the national character; or if the wages of banking, like the pay of armies, have already moulded our legislatures into mercenary troops, it may be lost to avoid an unavailing contest by a tacit submission; but if a publick exists in the United States, able to sustain a publick interest, a greater quantity of human happiness will be produced, by preferring that interest, to a monopoly in the hands of a very few.

This essay does not aspire to the honour of proposing a new political system. It only endeavours to ascertain the principles of old ones, and to shew that the publick will and publick interest, and an exclusive will and an artificial interest, cannot possibly constitute a governing power, in union. That these moral beings, are the only natural political enemies capable of existing, and are doomed by the author of human nature to eternal warfare. That no artificial balance can appease this eternal hostility, any more than it could reconcile good and evil. That hence, and not from a defective balance, Mr. Adams has never been able to find these opposite principles quietly poising each other. And that the United States, by creating a pecuniary separate interest, capable of entering the list with publick interest, have proclaimed a warfare precisely of that nature, which has demolished human liberty universally. In this age of avarice, a nation which creates paper stock and monied monopoly, but guards itself against feudal tenures, secures its liberty as wisely, as one would have done in the fourteenth century, by creating feudal tenures, and guarding itself against paper stock.

The gross and humiliating delusion by which banking lives, is, "that the family of industry, are enriched by the