Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/366

356 to advantage. Their influence in adjusting the distribution of money, would insure to the forbearing country its allotment in specie, whilst the inability of paper currency to fly abroad, condemns the banking country to the two evils of a redundancy of currency, and of receiving its allotment in local paper purchased by an annual tax.

It would be endless to enumerate all the effects of this condemnation; a few, serving to illustrate the scope of out' reasoning, and the imbecility of all attempts to prevent the natural flux and reflux of specie, cannot be omitted.

There is certainly a measure, beyond which a nation cannot be benefitted by money. Its redundancy being an evil, the political or commercial body instinctively labours to expel it, as the natural body does a disease. But if a nation entrusts to a college of political doctors, the power of dosing it with money, whilst they are enriched in proportion to the physick they administer, their fees will be their guide, and not the health of the patient. A redundancy of local currency, produced by doctors hired to keep it up; cannot be disgorged by the efforts of nature struggling for health.

Money (like prices, trades arid manufactures) regulates itself better than it can be regulated by the doctors, despotism, monopoly or banking. A regulation of money, is always a regulation of prices, and an interposition by law, in the economy of individuals. It covers effort and competition in every shape, and combines in a mass the several evils which would flow from distinct legal prices, for each separate object of human industry. Such an interposition with a single article of industry, has invariably terminated in mischief; it is therefore probable, that the power of measuring out currency, placed in corporations. which is an interposition with all prices, and all objects of human industry, will not produce good.

A providential scarcity of the metals, devoted to become the medium of commerce, prevents the evils of pecuniary