Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/364

364 ply itself without specie. It circulates, we will suppose, eighty millions of paper, costing the country ahove six per centum; adding these eighty millions to as much debt stock supposed to exist, and the grapples of stock to about thirty-two dollars a head, appear already to be thrown over us. Shall we disentangle ourselves from them whilst we have it in our power, or defer the effort, until we are irretrievably entangled in the intricacies of indirect slavery? A slavery, in which the sufferer is ignorant of his tyrant, and the tyrant is remorseless, because he is unconscious of his crime.

By hank stock, unless all our reasonings are erroneous, and our examples inapplicable, a government may subject a nation to the payment of a capitation profit, to those to whom it shall be conveyed by charter, exceeding any profit extract- ed from personal slaves; and political principles may be corrupted. Are there any greater temporal calamities? Are there any temporal blessings capable of balancing them? Weigh the terrifick duumvirate, oppressive taxation and a corrupt government, against the benefit proposed by banking. All it proposes, its total advantage, lies in the simple space of substituting some millions of bank currency, for some millions of specie currency.

We have endeavoured already to prove, that the substitution is an evil, supposing it to cost the nation neither money nor principles; if we have failed, it may yet be an evil, on account of the loss of money and principles it requires. "We will add several observations upon these points.

The freedom of our commerce, and the tendency of money to find a level in the commercial world, furnishes a well founded belief, that specie had arrived, or was hastening from all parts of the commercial world, to render us all the commercial services capable of being rendered by money, when banking cheeked its career.

The sudden diminution of specie upon this event, is an evidence that we had enough for our wants. Had we needed more currency, specie would have continued in circulation