Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/646

634 distributed, is for ever resisting similar legal frauds against its rights. Nature, by refusing to transmit talents or industry from father to son, frowns both upon hereditary forms of government, and equalising and accumulating laws. The first are the least adverse to her decrees. Individuals of fine qualities may be selected with whom to commence monarchies or aristocracies, and accident or education may possibly cause some succession of these qualities, however certainly fools or tyrants will turn up at last. But laws for enriching, in their commencement and throughout their operation, are regardless of merit; and the equalizing theory pretends both to keep property equal among evanescent beings, and to supersede mental inequalities. The ability of industry to divide property sufficiently to destroy political combinations, was demonstrated in England by the contrivance of the king and the judges, for letting her loose upon entails; and the ability of accumulating laws to destroy this wholesome operation, was subsequently demonstrated, by letting loose funding and banking laws upon industry. The idle, who seek for wealth by chartering laws, are wiser than their equalising brethren. Law has never been able to produce an equality of property, where industry exists; but it can produce its monopoly. Our policy rejects its application to both objects, and our constitutions unequivocally disclose an opinion, that civil liberty depends upon leaving the distribution of property to industry; hence laws for this end, are as unconstitutional, as those for re-establishing king, lords and commons. Legal wealth and hereditary power, are twin principles. These frauds beget all the parties or factions of civil society, such as patrician and plebeian, military and civil, stock and landed. The enmity and contrast in all these cases, arise from a legal difference of interest, and the active and passive members in this fraudulent system, are distinctly designated by the wealth and poverty it diffuses. In England, where it prevails. "every seventh person draws support from the parish at some period of his life, exclusive of