Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/360

350 into a paper aristocracy., will thence also become less beneficial to agriculture, because it will be influenced by the same spirit. That it can breathe its pernicious errours into the one, wide as it is spread, is evinced by its capacity toe corrupt the other, which spreads wider; unless the monopoly of national currency, is an organ of political respiration, less powerful than feudal monopoly. A close affinity is perceivable between the operations of a feudal and paper aristocracy; and if commerce could justly complain of the one, agriculture must suffer by the other. Labour needs land to produce, and money to transfer agricultural products. A monopoly of the necessity, land, or a monopoly of the necessity, money, are equivalent modes of extorting from labour. A vassalage, inflicted by means of the necessity, money is not more voluntary than a vassalage inflicted by means of the necessity, land. Borrowing is as unavoidable, as leasing for rent or services. The collection of the interest or dividends by a stock aristocracy, is as certain as the collection of rents and services by a feudal; and the superiority of one over the other, for effecting the end of every aristocracy, rests upon the superiority of the sum collected. This estimate is left to the reader.

We will proceed to another. As we all know that a regular influx of wealth, from a majority to a minority, is a regular influx of power, the United States ought to estimate the quantity of each, they are pouring into a banking interest. If no new banks should be created after 1808, nor the acquisitions of the old increased, the five millions annually collected by the existing banks, at compound interest, carry from the publick to the corporations, in twenty years, above one hundred and eighty-four millions of dollars. Here is already a vast current of money and power running one way j will those check it in whose favour the current sets? Are the receivers, as regulators of power and wealth, of undoubted confidence?

In the same twenty years, the United States lose the use of fifty mlllions of specie, or national currency, expelled or