Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/362

352 thousand people. Allowing her eighteen thousand actual labourers, and her stock to collect in expenses, perquisites and dividends, ten per centum, her labour pays a capitation tax of above twenty-two dollars annually to banks. If the union contains six millions of people, it can bear, by the ratio of Rhode-Island, four hundred and twenty millions of bank stock, which would inflict upon the people an annual tax of forty-two millions. There is nothing extravagant in this calculation ; England has far outstript it in stock accumulation ; Rhode-Island has already realized it.

If the stock interest in Rhode-Island, draws more nett profit from banking, than the Virginia masters do from eighteen thousand Negro slaves, banking approaches in substance to a mode of selling freemen. Arthur Young calculates the profit of English West-India slaves, at five pounds each. The banking mode of converting the labour of one to the use of another, is more profitable than this personal slavery.

We cannot omit here to remark a difference between the pecuniary interest of wealthy classes. Where monied capital or stock constitutes wealth, its interest points to land and labour, as the only objects able to satisfy its purpose and trade; but where land and labour constitute it, income and accumulation can only be diawn out of itself by the creations of industry; for the utmost oppression of real over factitious wealth, is limited to a forbearance of its own bounty. This suggests a question of worldly wisdom. It is left to the reader to decide which is the dupe. The stock interest, in supposing that it enriches itself by banking, at the expense of land and labour; or the land and labour interest, in supposing that banking Mill enrich that. One is inevitably mistaken.

The efficacy of stock, as a mode by which governments sell or give nations to minorities, of which they may constitute a portion themselves, is capable of arithmetical certainty. A debt of four hundred and twenty millions sterling, covers twelve millions of people at thirty-five pounds ster-