patronage, was no slavery, if the profits arising from such institutions were received by English capitalists: does the substitution of a different receiver, alter the case? If not, “taxation” is “slavery," however moderate the tax may be, when the object of the tax is not the publick benefit, but to enrich and impoverish individuals, and thereby undermine the principles necessary to preserve national liberty.

As to oppressive taxation, there are few cases capable of justifying it; and none, those excepted, wherein it repels a greater evil than itself. Admit that it expels tyranny; it is itself a tyrant. Admit that tyranny will obliterate moral virtues, and replenish the mind with vices; oppressive taxation will do it also. A nation oppressed by taxes, can never be generous, benevolent or enlightened. If the lion was burdened like the ass, he would presently become cowardly, and stupid. But oppressive taxation, by law and monopoly, direct and indirect, to create or sustain the systein of paper and patronage, proposes nothing retributory for reducing a people to the condition of asses, except an aristocracy to provide for them a succession of burdens.

Hereditary aristocracy, supported by perpetuities, is preferable to a paper and patronage aristocracy, because its taxation would be less oppressive, since its landed estate would furnish it with opulence and power; whereas eternal and oppressive taxation is necessary to supply the aristoeracy of paper and patronage, with these vital qualities.

As a government is melted by law, into the aristocracy of the third age, the ligaments which united it with the nation, are gradually broken; and a consciousness of this, gradually drives the government, for defending itself against the people, into war, armies, corruption, debt, charters, bounties, and every species of patronage for which a pretext can be invented; and a sinking fund cloaks its drift, as proclamations did that of Lewis the fourteenth, declaring, previously to his inundating Europe with Christian blood his anxiety to prevent its effusion.

When this process is managed by a government, it proves that the government is welded to that interest which the process advances; it substantially destroys the English theory; divides a nation into two interests, and cooks one in the modes most delicious to the appetite of the other. Such is the essential evil of every species of bad govern- ment, by whatever name distinguished. A particular interest thus quartered upon the general interest, has never failed to harrass a nation: a government is good, when it is coupled to the general interest; and bad, when it is coupled to a particular interest of any kind, whether military, hierarchical, feudal, or stock.

It is admitted by Mr. Adams, that an order of men having great wealth, will acquire a correspondent degree of power. If this wealth consists of land, it may be measured and balanced. Suppose a nation should establish a landed nobility, and should conclude that the possession of one third of the lands, would confer a share of wealth on this order so unequal, as to make it unmanageable, and of course despotick; this nation might restrict their landed order to one fourth of all the lands in the state, concluding that the three fourths divided among all other orders, might suffice to check the power arising from condensing one fourth in one interest. This is what Lord Shaftsbury means by "a balance of property." But if an order of paper and patronage is erected, (remember that nothing makes an order but one interest,) in what manner is its power to be checked by a balance of property? The wealth of paper and patronage is daily growing, wherefore it cannot be measured or limited; it is therefore impossible to balance it ; and yet without this balance of property, the power which clings to wealth, will destroy liberty, even in the opinion of the English theorists. According to Mr. Adams's principles, this syllogism presents itself. Exorbitant wealth will obtain a degree of power dangerous to society, if not checked or balanced; paper systems will bestow exorbitant wealth, to check or

balance which, no means have been invented; therefore, paper systems are dangerous to society.

Not land, but its profit, constitutes wealth and power. By taxation, the profit arising from land may be apportioned between the possession, and the system of paper and patronage; or it may be wholly transferred to the system. If then an order, such as the late nobility and clergy of France, by an income consisting of the profit of one third of the lands of France, attracted a degree of power oppressive to the nation; does it not evidently follow, whenever the system of paper and patronage, has acquired one third of the profit produced by all the lands of a nation, that it will also acquire the oppressive degree of power, interwoven with that degree of wealth?

Although I am considering this system in relation to Britain, an ignorance of any rule by which to compute the profit of all the land of that island, compels me to refer to America for an illustration of the last observation.

All the exports from the United States, may probably amount to the whole profit yielded by land, allowing subsistence to the possessors, which forms no part of rent or profit. This amount has never extended to sixty millions of dollars annually, yet for the purpose of including the whole, we will estimate the annual profit of land at that sum. If the interest of paper and patronage received twelve milli ons annually from direct taxation, and eight millions annually from indirect, by bounties and the circulation of bank paper, then this system would possess that degree of wealth, which rendered the former civil and religious nobility of France, dangerous and oppressive; and it would be obvious, that a system, which had so rapidly absorbed one third of the profit of the land in the United States, possessed a capacity of extending that third to a moiety, or even beyond a moiety, as in England; and that as no mode of collecting a dangerous degree of wealth into one interest, with equal rapidity, had ever yet appeared, there is none so alarming to a nation, or which so loudly demanded the application of

Mr. Adams's or Lord Shaftsbury's idea of a balance of property.

To display the celerity with which this system collects wealth, and changes forms of government, it is only neces sary to recollect, that the mode of monopolizing wealth by conquest, required above six hundred years to destroy the Roman Republick; whereas the system of paper and patronage, by changing the nature of the English government in less than a century, has verified the savage opinion, that certain conjurers by hieroglyphical representations, could take away life ; it transfers property and kills governments by a like graphical art. It paints as many pounds or dol. lars upon paper as it pleases, which transfers money and power from the holders of land and industry, to the holders of the paper. Let casuists decide between the morality of taking away life in the mode of the Indian conjurer, and ta king away property and liberty in the mode of the paper conjurer.

Is it on account of this sorcery, that the aristocracy of the third age considers painting as one of the fine arts, and devotes its whole philosophy to a taste for this species of it? The aristocracies of superstition and ennobled orders, by cultivating the circle of the sciences, checked their passions, and humanized their rule; this cultivates a science to take away the property of its friends, like that used by a savage to take away the life of his foe. The savage passion of vengeance is however appeased, by the death of the father, and thirsts not for the blood of the son; but the passion, which seeks property by hieroglyphical representation, is never appeased, and what it takes from one generation, only whets its malignity towards the next. Is this sorcery really preferable to the ancient modes of aristocracy?

It is universally agreed that power is attracted by wealth. Ten hundred millions of pounds sterling, being a great sum of wealth, must therefore attract some share of power to the paper interest of England. Whatever it attracts was not bestowed by the English form of government, and is of

course an unconstitutional and revolutionary acquisition. This must be admitted, or it must be proved, that great wealth acquired by a particular interest, does not attract power. If the system of paper and patronage, will destroy the principles of limited monarchy without changing its forms, either by amalgamating king, lords and commons, oroby creating a new power, may it not also destroy the principles of a republican government, and leave its form also standing?

United interests, or an aggregation of wealth by one interest, are equally at enmity with Mr. Adams's system of a balance of power and property; and if the system of paper and patronage produces both or either, his cannot exist a moment in communion with that. An unconquerable enmity in theory and principle, would crown an attempt to foster both these systems, with several ludicrous inconsistencies. Mr. Adams's system requires an illustrious, highspirited, enlightened, virtuous and wealthy house of Lords; and the system of paper and patronage would fill it with the spawn of stockjobbing and corruption. How long will it require to purge off the contaminations of the father before the son will be well born? Or will not the system of paper and patronage recontaminate faster, than the generative process can purify, so as to prevent Mr. Adams from ever collecting the necessary qualities in his noble senate? Withsut superior qualities, his system does not contend for superior distinction ; but it is notorious that the system of paper and patronage peoples the two houses of parliament in England, and so completely moulds their character, that all sorts of men, make the same sort of lords and commons.

We may conceive the manner in which the aristocracy of the third age is consolidated with a government, by supposing the territory to be represented by a multitude of landscapes, which the government could transfer with the lands they represented, just as it transfers wealth by pictures of money. Would not the individuals who administered the government, take to themselves some of these landscapes ?