Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/368

358 the paper system would impoverish the agricultural interest, which produces our exportable labour, worm it out of the government, and reduce it to subjection. Let the fate of the English manufacturers, from a paper regimen, point to our agricultural fate, under a similar regimen. Let their fate also display the justice dispensed by a power to regulate currency. It is the justice invariably dispensed under the seduction of avarice. But seduction is unnecessary to produce an adherence to one's own interest. A power to regulate currency for the agricultural, or manufactural interest, and to enrich itself thereby, will rapidly acquire the weapon which governs the world. In pursuance of its separate interest, it has usurped the government in England, under the name of the monied interest: reader, which is the preferable substitute for our constitutional policy, the Emperour of France, or the monied interest of England?

The power of substituting a factitious local currency, for one naturally universal, is a handle, stronger than that of superstition, with which to manage nations. Allegiance to the faction, is secured by the fear of losing this artificial money. Specie is independent of a faction, and able to become a patriot. It can attend us in our flight from tyranny, and travel over the world, to feed, clothe and arm patriots but paper chains to the sod, and remains at home to tax for party or corporation benefit, and not to cherish liberty. But let us leave the goddess to take care of herself, and look a little farther after our money. Although we have seen separate interests enslaving nations from the beginning of the world, it is still a very difficult thing to make mankind believe, that corporations for gathering money, do really take that which they were instituted to take. They are now convinced, that the separate interests of superstition and title, had their money in view, under other pretences; and to save it, have expelled them. But they will not believe, that a pecuniary order, which avows the design, denied by these detected orders, is in earnest. No, this order, unlike others, intends to enrich nations, not itself. Let us count these riches in other modes.