Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/151

 favourable; for what the ebb tide takes away the flood returns. It is an axiom in political economy that a favourable state of the exchanges acts as a bounty on imports and as a duty on exports, while the reverse takes place when the exchanges are unfavourable. The true par forms the centre of these oscillations, and though peculiar circumstances will rarely allow that par to be exactly hit, yet the tendency to approach it is constant, and the divergence from it is always evanescent. But the home trade is governed by very different influences; for, while we pay taxes on all we consume, the foreigner pays none on what he purchases from us, since he deals with us according to the measure of value, while we deal with each other according to price. Gold represents the natural price of commodities, not the taxed price. Therefore, we ought to have two sorts of currency; let bullion serve for foreign trade, but let us have government paper, convertible into gold at the market price—not the Mint price—as the medium of internal exchanges. When gold is scarce, let it rise in value measured in the Bank or National note, and we need not fear a drain of bullion.

There can be no freedom nor safety, much less prosperity, for any people till they obtain just laws to regulate landed tenures, credit, and commercial interchange. With such laws there could not exist a bad government, nor would oppression in any form be possible. Without such laws there cannot be a good government, be its form, its administration, its institutes, or its franchises what they may. Land, and whatever else the Deity has made for man's use, must be expropriated, by commutation, on equitable terms for the general good, and never again be made private property. Credit must be accessible for every member of the community, on terms beneficial for the individual, and just and safe for the public. And all commerce must be gradually, reduced to equitable exchange on the principle of equal values for equal values, measured by a labour or corn standard.

Under the systems of Landed Tenures, Currency, and Commerce which at present prevail in England and in France, it is no exaggeration to say, that those who live upon rents, profits, usury, discounts, dividends, commissions, fees, etc., absorb from 300 to 350 million pounds sterling worth of the people's produce in each country every year, over and above what they give the people any value whatever for, in money or service of any appreciable kind. In fact, for this enormous annual drain the useful classes of both countries receive no consideration whatever. It is sheer robbery, disguised under plausible names and forms. The Seven Propositions of the National Reform League present what would seem the only feasible means of ridding the country of this crushing incubus, consistent with acknowledging legal rights and vested interests. Unless some such compromise be agreed on between rich and poor, both in England and in France, a convulsion, sooner or later, that will engulf both, must be the inevitable consequence. No country could long sustain two such existing drains by the idle and baneful classes upon the laborious producers—drains equal to from 300 to 350