Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/404

394 for the accumulation, as agrarian laws, for the division of property.

If it is contended, that the state and general legislatures, cannot pass laws for dividing property, but that they may pass laws for its accumulation in the hands of a chartered interest; or that laws either for the division or accumulation of property, are of an honest and genuine municipal nature, without possessing a capacity to model power, and change governments; and if these assertions can be proved, we must proceed to the following argument.

The formation of society, and the alteration of its constituent rules, are admitted by our policy to be rights exclusively lodged in the people, in which rights the government they establish have no share. It is also admitted, that the rights subsisting previous to the compacts called constitutions, all remain, except those relinquished for the sake of forming the government. Banking diminishes these remaining rights, by transferring a portion of them to a new society, not formed by the people. Rut the government has no power to touch rights, not surrendered by the people for its formation. It was lately stated, that if a legislature can by law form a new society, to draw money artificially from the rest of a nation, that the residue of the old society was no longer in a social state. By the association of the people, the principle of an equality of rights may be asserted and established. By the association of the government, the contrary and artificial principle of exclusive privilege, may be asserted and established. Property, by the association of the people, may be placed under the protection of the first principle: by the association of the government, it may be exposed to the depredations of the second. The first association makes an entire nation; the second divides that nation into two, privileged and unprivileged. The object of one. may be the general good; of the other, to make the general good subservient to private avarice. Both their principles and ends may be precisely opposite. Suppose this new formed little nation, had been