Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/631

Rh the English system of legislating ways and means for extracting wealth from labour, and of course leaving it ignorance; but if it should, our cultivators will voluntarily inflict on themselves the evils, under which the English tenantry unwillingly groan. Laws for dividing landed, and accumulating legal wealth, will also convey mean talents to real, and splended to artificial property; and the effects of moral superiority inevitably follow. Even laws with the specious object of diffusing education, may be contrived to distribute knowledge and ignorance, so as to establish the power of legal aristocracies of interest. It is easy to educate agriculture and labour at their own expense, sufficiently for submission, but insufficiently to balance or control the high moral accomplishments bestowed upon aristocracies of interest, as an appurtenance of the wealth transferred to them from agriculture and labour by fraudulent laws. Projects of this kind will be used to conceal from the mass of a nation, the undeniable truth, that no such experiments can save its liberty, whilst laws exist for creating factitious wealth; because all parties will use such a legislative power to produce great inequalities of wealth, and this wealth will carry with it those talents which guide all civilized governments, though all the rest of the nation should receive ordinary educations.

The idea of equalising knowledge, is as impracticable as that of equalising property by agrarian laws. Both are extremities of political fancy. But the opposite extremities are unfortunately practicable. Knowledge, and property or wealth, may be rendered extremely unequal by fraudulent laws. And it often happens, that the destroyers of primogeniture, for the sake of dividing lands, are so inconsistent, as to accumulate wealth by laws founded in the contrary principle. A power to distribute knowledge or wealth, is a power to distribute both. One is annexed to the other. A free government cannot subsist with either power, because selfishness invariably patronises itself and its adherents, and allots ignorance and poverty to the mass