Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/48

38 as its conscience or its no conscience will allow it to receive; and lest the capacity of public loaning to transfer private property should be overlooked, it has proceeded in England to the indirect sale of private real property. If a land tax is sold for a term amounting to the value of the land, a proprietor is to buy his own land at its value, or admit of a co-proprietor, to whom he must pay that value by instalments; and thus a paper system can sell all the land.of a nation. If national danger should occur after this sale, it can only be met by the people; and the purchaser from a paper system, of an exemption from the land tax to-day, must be again taxed or fight for his land to-morrow. The case of this individual is precisely that of every nation, made use of directly or indirectly to enrich a paper system; it is perpetually at auction, and never receives any thing for itself; because, however ingeniously a paper system can manage artificial danger for its own emolument, it is neither able nor willing to meet real danger; and however rich it is made by a nation, the nation must still defend itself, or perish.

This catastrophe has already arrived in Britain. Swindled out of endless wealth, by the vauntings of paper credit, of its will and ability to defend liberty and property; that hapless nation sees itself taxed and impressed, to increase the penalty' of its own credulity, and to protect that which promised to yield protection; its annual taxes beget annual additions to permanent debt, and its endless war with France was commenced by the fears of its paper system, however this war may have gradually changed its ground. The effect of opposite interests, one enriched by and governing the other, correctly follows its cause. One interest is a tyrant, the other its slave. In Britain, one of these interests owes to the other above ten hundred millions of pounds sterling, which would require twelve millions of slaves to discharge, at eighty pounds sterling each. If the debtor interest amounts to ten millions of souls, and would be worth forty pounds sterling round, sold for slaves, it pays