Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/399

Rh of government, is to protect individuals against these very associations. The tyranny of fraud is not less oppressive, than that of force. Ail national grievances act upon individuals. A redundancy of circulating paper stock, collecting an enormous tax, must act upon individuals, like other national grievances. If the tea hundred millions of such stock in England, was suddenly converted into specie, whatever would fly away to other countries, would be the portion of currency, useless, and therefore oppressive to the extent of the tax it gathered. The specie expelled by bank paper from the United States, was made by that paper a redundancy of currency, useless, or it would have remained: the tax paid for a paper redundancy, which cannot follow the specie, is an oppression similar to the English. We see in the example of England, the errour of an opinion, that the quantity of a paper currency will be regulated by national wants; we see in America, that bank currency soon expels as redundant, a sum of specie currency, and takes its place to a far greater amount; we see that this redundancy, though unnecessary and pernicious, can gather wealth for a separate interest; to what amount, England has laboured in vain to discover, for a whole century. What expedient can individuals use to avoid these calamities?

Let individuals shift for themselves. What is this, but to exclude them from the benefits of government and society? Unassociated, the bitter beverage, prescribed by the paper capitalists to the English manufacturers, must replenish their cups. There, capital thrives, and labour starves. Here, industry has hitherto regularly gained from capital possessed by idleness. This wholesome operation will be reversed, as in England, by factitious capital, able to tax and out-thrive industry. It can as easily become the master of the industry applied to the earth, as of that applied to the products of the earth. The portion of a nation subject to supply the income of a paper capital, is not in fact in a state of society. Union or association implies equality,