Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/630

618 rich. It is only necessary to chasten aea«lemical institutions by the same good moral principles necessary to make a good government. To establish responsibility; to make income depend on merit; and to banibli offices for life, sinecure salaries, and idle, vicious, or incompetent functionaries.

The difference between knowledge and education is certainly considerable. We often find most liberty attached to the inferior stock of education, but we should be able to discern a more equal distribution of knowledge attached to it. Without attempting to reconcile theory and fact in such cases, it is sufficient to observe, that civil laws contrived to dispense knowledge to parties, sects, or exclusive interests of any kiad, and ignorance to the majority, are precisely of the same nature with those contrived to dispense wealth and poverty in the same way. A wise clergy and an ignorant laity, or a wise stock interest and an ignorant agricultural interest, produce the same consequences as any other rich and poor orders or interests. Either molten or printed images can forge and fix fetters. Hence it behooves a nation Laving wisdom enough to be free, to supervise the conduct of its government by conventions, and to prevent a fraudulent management of education, as well as of property, by civil laws. for the purposes of fostering parties of interest, defending fraud, and maintaining despotism.

In the United States, agriculture covers the interest of a vast majority. Whatever civil laws pass for distributing knowledge or wealth, operate against her; because being the mother which suckles all other interests, her own children cannot suckle her. Our landed interest corresponds with the tenantry of England, being composed, generally, of cultivators. The English landlords are satisfied with a policy which distributes wealth and knowledge by civil laws, because they are themselves the chief objects of its fraudulent bounty, and their tenants the chief assignees of ignorance and poverty. The gross errour of the American agricultural interest, in imagining itself to bear a resemblance to the English landlord interest, may beguile it into