Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/407

Rh If banking would change our form of government in the supposed mode, it demonstrates the capacity of law for that end. If it could thus influence legislatures, it demonstrates its capacity to form individuals into corrupt factions. And if it would be dangerous to any society, should a foreign nation create a corrupt faction by a pecuniary influence within its bowels, it is more dangerous to it that its own government should do so, for the reasons by which the danger of an influence, foreign or domestick, over the state governments, is graduated.

The course of reasoning pursued by this essay, results in the definition, that a tranfer of property by law, is aristocracy, and that aristocracy is a transfer of property by law. Mr. Adams's book is eminently instructive, by proving that aristocracy has every where generated calamitous struggles between those who gained, and those who lost property. Besides the unavoidable atrocities of enriched and impoverished factions, Mr. Adams proves by a multitude of examples, that the same aristocratical policy, will induce one or the other of these factions to destroy every vestige of free government ; the enriched, to fortify their fraudulent wealth and power ; the impoverished, to flee for refuge against many tyrants, under one. It is true that the banking mode of introducing these mischiefs, like the balancing, will ascribe them to an inartificial texture of the machine, but it will not gain the long credit of other aristocratical principles, because its superior rapacity will hasten it on towards the usual catastrophe of political fraud.