expect unwisely? Is it, because it deceives the mind in its purest and most flexible period? Is it, because it is an error, that every day's experience aids to detect? An error against which all history is full of warning examples? Or is it because the experiment has been tried before our eyes and the error made palpable? in its second generation, was to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and genuine refinements of European culture: and where I dreamt that, in the sober evening of my life, I should behold the Cottages of Independence in the undivided Dale of Industry, "And oft, soothed sadly by some dirgeful wind Strange fancies! and as vain as strange! yet to the intense interest and impassioned zeal, which called forth and strained every faculty of my intellect for the organization and defence of this scheme, I owe much of whatever I at present possess, my clearest insight into the nature of individual man, and my the true uses of trade and commerce, and how far most comprehensive views of his social relations, of the wealth and relative power of nations promote or From what source are we to derive this strange phenomenon, that the young and the enthusiastic, who, as our daily experience informs us, are deceived in their religious antipathies, and grow wiser; in their friendships, and grow wiser; in their modes of pleasure, and grow wiser; should, if once deceived in a question of abstract politics, cling to the error for ever and ever? And this too, although in addition to the natural growth of judgment and information with increase of years, they live in the age in which the tenets have been acted upon; and though the conse-impede their welfare and inherent strength. Nor quences have been such, that every good man's heart sickens, and his head turns giddy at the retrospect. ESSAY II. Truth I pursued, as Fancy sketch'd the way, I was never myself, at any period of my life, a convert to the system. From my earliest manhood, it was an axiom in Politics with me, that in every country where property prevailed, property must be the grand basis of the government; and that that government was the best, in which the power or political influence of the individual was in proportion to his property, provided that the free circulation of property was not impeded by any positive laws or customs, nor the tendency of wealth to accumulate in abiding masses unduly encouraged. I perceived, that if the people at large were neither ignorant nor immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden and violent change of government; and if they were, there could be no hope but of a change for the worse. "The Temple of Despotism, like that of the Mexican God, would be rebuilt with human skulls, and more firmly, though in a different architecture."* Thanks to the excellent education which I had received, my reason was too clear not to draw this "circle of power" round me, and my spirit too honest to attempt to break through it. My feelings, however, and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration; and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had! I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of government and whole nations, I hoped from Religion and a small company of chosen individuals, and formed a plan, as harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of human perfectibility on the banks of the Susquehannah; where our little society, *To the best of my recollection, these were Mr. Southey's words in the year 1794. were they less serviceable in securing myself, and perhaps some others, from the pitfalls of sedition: and when we gradually alighted on the firm ground of common sense, from the gradually-exhausted balloon of youthful enthusiasm, though the air-built castles, which we had been pursuing, had vanished with all their pageantry of shifting forms and glowing colors, we were yet free from the stains and impurities which might have remained upon us, had we been travelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents, through the dark lanes and foul bye-roads of ordinary fanaticism. But oh! there were thousands as young and as innocent as myself who, not like me, sheltered in the tranquil nook or inland cove of a particular fancy, were driven along with the general current! Many there were, young men of loftiest minds, yea the prime stuff out of which manly wisdom and practicable greatness is to be formed, who had appropriated their hopes and the ardor of their souls to mankind at large, to the wide expanse of national interests, which then seemed fermenting in the French Republic as the main outlet and chief crater of the revolutionary torrents; and who confidently believed, that these torrents, like the lavas of Vesuvius, were to subside into a soil of inexhaustible fertility on the circumjacent lands, the old divisions and mouldering edifices of which they had covered or swept away— Enthusiasts of kindliest temperament, who, to use the words of the Poet, (having already borrowed the meaning and the metaphor) had approached "the shield Of human nature from the golden side, And would have fought even to the death to attest The quality of the metal which they saw." My honored friend has permitted me to give a value and relief to the present Essay, by a quotation from one of his unpublished Poems, the length of which I regret only from its forbidding me to trespass on his kindness by making it yet longer. I trust there are many of my Readers of the same age with myself who will throw themselves back into the state of thought and feeling in which they were when France was reported to have solemnized her first sacrifice of error and prejudice on the bloodless altar of Freedom, by an oath of peace and good-will to all gruous than to combine the pusillanimity, which de mankind. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliaries, which then stood But to be young was very heaven! oh! times The budding rose above the rose full blown. Or some secreted island, heaven knows where! WORDSWORTH. The Peace of Amiens deserved the name of peace, for it gave us unanimity at home, and reconciled Englishmen with each other. Yet it would be as wild a fancy as any of which we have treated, to expect that the violence of party spirit is never more to return. Sooner or later the same causes, or their equivalents, will call forth the same opposition of opinion, and bring the same passions into play. Ample would be my recompense, could I foresee that this present Es. say would be the means of preventing discord and unhappiness in a single family; if its words of warning, aided by its tones of sympathy, should arm a single man of genius against the fascinations of his own ideal world, a single philanthropist against the enthusiasm of his own heart! Not less would be my satisfaction, dared I flatter myself that my lucubrations would not be altogether without effect on those who deem themselves Men of Judgment, faithful to the light of Practice, and not to be led astray by the wandering fires of Theory! If I should aid in making these aware, that in recoiling with too incautious an abhorrence from the bugbears of innovation, they may sink all at once into the slough of slavishness and corruption. Let such persons recollect that the charms of hope and novelty furnish some palliation for the idolatry to which they seduce the mind; but that the apotheosis of familiar abuses and of the errors of selfishness is the vilest of superstitions. Let them recollect too, that nothing can be more incon Ispairs of human improvement, with the arrogance, supercilious contempt, and boisterous anger, which have no pretensions to pardon except as the overflow. ings of ardent anticipation and enthusiastic faith! And finally, and above all, let it be remembered by both parties, and indeed by controversialists, on all subjects, that every speculative error which boasts a multitude of advocates, has its golden as well as its dark side; that there is always some Truth connected with it, the exclusive attention to which has misled the Understanding, some moral beauty which has given it charms for the heart. Let it be remembered, that no Assailant of an Error can reasonably hope to be listened to by its Advocates, who has not proved to them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same point of view, and is capable of contemplating it with the same feelings as themselves: (for why should we abandon a cause at the persuasions of one who is ignorant of the reasons which has attached us to it?) Let it be remembered, that to write, however ably, merely to convince those who are already convinced, displays but the courage of a boaster; and in any subject to rail against the evil before we have inquired for the good, and to exasperate the passions of those who think with us, by caricaturing the opinions and blackening the motives of our antagonists, is to make the Understanding the pander of the pas sions; and even though we should have defended the right cause, to gain for ourselves ultimately, from the good and the wise no other praise than the supreme Judge awarded to the friends of Job for their partial and uncharitable defence of his justice: "My wrath is kindled against you, for ye have not spoken of me rightfully." ESSAY III. ON THE VULGAR ERRORS RESPECTING TAXES AND TAXATION.* Οπερ γὰ ρδι τὰς ἐγχέλεις θηρώ μενοι πέπονθας Όταν μὲν ἡ λίμνμ καταςῆ, λαμβάνουσιν ουδέν Εάν δ' ἄνω τε και κάτω τὸν βορβορον κυκῶσιν, Αἴρουσι· και συ λαμβάνεις, ἢν τὴν πόλιν ταράττης. Translation. It is with you as with those that are hunting for ecls. While the pond is clear and settled, they take bring up the fish--and you succeed only as far as you can nothing; but if they stir up the mud high and low, then, they set the State in tumult and confusion. In a passage in the last Essay, I referred to the second part of the " Rights of Man," in which Paine assures his Readers that their Poverty is the consequence of Taxation: that taxes are rendered necessary only by wars and state corruption; that war and corruption are entirely owing to monarchy and aristocracy; that by a revolution and * For the moral effects of our present System of Finance, and its consequences on the welfare of the Nation, as distinguished from its wealth, the Reader is referred to the Author's Second Lay Sermon, and to the Section of Morals in a subsequent part of this Work. and the Government may be fairly considered as a great manufacturing house carrying on in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the ship-builder, the clother, the iron-founder, &c. &c. There are so many real evils, so many just causes of complaint in the Constitution and Administration of Governments, our own not excepted, that it becomes the imperious Duty of every Well-wisher of his country, to prevent, as much as in him lies, the feelings and efforts of his compatriots from losing themselves on a wrong scent. Whether a System of Taxation is injurious or beneficial on the whole, is to be known, not by the amount of the sum taken from each individual, but by that which remains behind. A war will doubtless cause a stagnation of certain branches of Trade, and severe temporary distress in the places where those branches are carried on; but are not the same effects produced in time of Peace by prohibitory edicts and commercial regulations of foreign powers, or by new rivals with superior advantages in other countries, or in different parts of the same? Bristol has, doubtless, been injured by the rapid prosperity of Liverpool and its superior spirit of Enterprize; and the vast Machines of Lan a brotherly alliance with the French Republic, our land and sea forces, our revenue officers, and three-fourths of our pensioners, placemen, &c. &c. would be rendered superfluous; and that a small part of the expenses thus saved, would suffice for the maintenance of the poor, the infirm, and the aged, throughout the kingdom. Would to Heaven! that this infamous mode of misleading and flattering the lower classes were confined to the writings of Thomas Paine. But how often do we hear, even from the mouths of our parliamentary advocates for popularity, the taxes stated as so much money actually lost to the people; and a nation in debt represented as the same both in kind and consequences, as an individual tradesman on the brink of bankruptcy? It is scarcely possible, that these men should be themselves deceived; that they should be so ignorant of history as not to know that the freest nations, being at the same time commercial, have been at all times the most heavily taxed or so void of common sense as not to see that there is no analogy in the case of a tradesman and his creditors, to a nation indebted to itself. Surely, a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where what the one loses the other gains. Taxes may be indeed, and often are in-cashire have overwhelmed and rendered hopeless jurious to a country: at no time, however, from their amount merely, but from the time or injudicious mode in which they are raised. A great Statesman, lately deceased, in one of his antiministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said: the nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood. This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of Taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a dis-say, that so much more money is raised, but that so proportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helpless. ness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large. But a fuller and fairer symbol of Taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the planet. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, the pasture, and the cornfield; but it may likewise force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the staguant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sandwaste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of Fi-tinental Europe, with all the fences and obstacles of nance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing mage of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population, by the joint effect of Taxation and Trade. For Taxation itself is a part of Commerce, the domestic industry of the females in the Cottages and small farm-houses of Westmoreland and Cumberland. But if Peace has its stagnations as well as War, does not War create or re-enliven numerous branches of Industry as well as Peace? Is it not a fact, that not only our own military and naval forces, but even a part of those of our enemy are armed and clothed by British manufacturers? It cannot be doubted, that the whole of our immense military force is better and more expensively clothed, and both these and our sailors better fed than the same persons would be in their individual capacities: and this forms one of the real expenses of War. Not, I much more of the means of comfortable existence are consumed, than would otherwise have been. But does not this, like all other luxury, act as a stimulus on the producing classes, and this in the most useful manner, and on the most important branches of production, on the tiller, on the grazier, the clothier, and the maker of arms? Had it been otherwise, is it possible that the receipts from the Property Tax should have increased instead of decreased, notwithstanding all the rage of our enemy? Surely, never from the beginning of the world was such a tribute of admiration paid by one power to another, as Bonaparte within the last years has paid to the British Empire! With all the natural and artificial powers of almost the whole of con public and private morality broken down before him, with a mighty empire of fifty millions of men, near. ly two-thirds of whom speak the same language, and are as it were fused together by the intensest nationality; with this mighty and swarming empire, organized in all its parts for war, and forming one huge camp, and himself combining in his own person the two-fold power of Monarch and Commander in Chief, with all these advantages, with all these stupendous instruments and inexhaustible resources of offence, this mighty Being finds himself imprisoned by the enemy whom he most hates and would fain despise, insulted by every wave that breaks upon his shores, and condemned to behold his vast flotillas as worthless and idle as the sea-weed that rots around their keels! After years of haughty menace and expensive preparations for the invasion of an island, the trees and buildings of which are visible from the roofs of his naval store-houses, he is at length compelled to make open confession, that he possesses one mean only of ruining Great Britain. And what is it? The ruin of his own enslaved subjects! To undermine the resources of one enemy, he reduces the Continent of Europe to the wretched state in which it was before the wide diffusion of Trade and Commerce, deprives its inhabitants of comforts and advantages to which they and their fathers had been for more than a century, habituated, and thus destroys, as far as his power extends, a principal source of civilization, the origin of a middle class throughout Christendom, and with it the true balance of society, the parent of international law, the fosternurse of general humanity, and (to sum up all in one) | the main principle of attraction and repulsion, by which the nations were rapidly though insensibly drawing together into one system, and by which alone they could combine the manifold blessings of distinct character and national independence, with the needful stimulation and general influences of intercommunity, and be virtually united without being crushed together by conquest, in order to waste away under the tabes and slow putrefaction of a universal monarchy. This boasted Pacificator of the World, this earthly Providence,* as his Catholic Bishops blasphemously call him, professes to entertain no hope of purchasing the destruction of Great Britain at a less price than that of the barbarism of all Europe! By the ordinary war of government against government, fleets against fleets, and armies against armies, he could effect nothing. His fleets might as well have been built at his own expense in our Dock-yards, as tribute-offerings to the masters of the Ocean and his Army of England lay encamped on his Coasts like Wolves baying the Moon! Delightful to humane and contemplative minds was the idea of countless individual efforts working together by common instinct and to a common object, under the protection of an unwritten code of religion, philosophy, and common interest which made peace and brotherhood co-exist with the most active hostility. Not in the untamed Plains of Tartary, but in *It has been well remarked, that there is something far more shocking in the tyrant's pretensions to the gracious attributes of the Supreme Ruler, than in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild grandeur, not ungratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timur Khan to one who remonstrated with him on the inhumanity of his devastations: cur me hominem putas, et non potius iram Dei in terris agentem ob perniciem humani generis? Why do you deem me a man, and not rather the incarnate wrath of God acting on the earth for the ruin of mankind? the very bosom of civilization, and himself indebted to its fostering care for his own education and for all the means of his elevation and power, did this geneine offspring of the old serpent warm himself into the fiend-like resolve of waging war against mankind and the quiet growth of the world's improvement, in an emphatic sense the enemy of the human race! By these means only he deems Great Britain assailable (a strong presumption, that our prosperity is built on the common interests of mankind!)—this he acknow ledges to be his only hope-and in this hope he has been utterly baffled! To what then do we owe our strength and our immunity? The sovereignty of law: the incorrupt ness of its administration; the number and political importance of our religious sects, which in an incalculable degree have added to the dignity of the es tablishment; the purity, or at least the decorum of private morals, and the independence, activity, and weight, of public opinion? These and similar advantages are doubtless the materials of the fortress, but what has been the cement? What has bound them together? What has rendered Great Britain, from the Orkneys to the Rocks of Scilly, indeed and with more than metaphorical propriety a BODY POLI TIC, our Roads, Rivers, and Canals being so truly the veins, arteries, and nerves, of the state; that every pulse in the metropolis produces a correspondent pulsation in the remotest village on its extreme shores! What made the stoppage of the national Bank the conversation of a day without causing one irregular throb, or the stagnation of the commercial current in the minutest vessel? I answer without hesitation. that the cause and mother principle of this unexampled confidence, of this system of credit, which is as much stronger than mere positive possessions, as the soul of man is than his body, or as the force of a mighty mass in free motion, than the pressure of its separate component parts would be in a state of rest the main cause of this, I say, has been our NATIONAL DEBT. What its injurious effects on the Litera ture, the Morals, and religious Principles, have been, I shall hereafter develope with the same boldness. But as to our political strength and circumstantial prosperity, it is the national debt which has wedded in indissoluble union all the interests of the state, the landed with the commercial, and the man of independent fortune with the stirring tradesman and reposing annuitant. It is the National Debt, which by the rapid nominal rise in the value of things, has made it impossible for any considerable number of men to retain their own former comforts without joining in the common industry, and adding to the stock of national produce; which thus first necessi tates a general activity, and then by the immediate and ample credit, which is never wanting to him, who has any object on which his activity can employ itself, gives each man the means not only of preserv ing but of increasing and multiplying all his former enjoyments, and all the symbols of the rank in which he was born. It is this which has planted the naked hills and enclosed the bleak wastes, in the lowlands of Scotland, not less than in the wealthier districts of South Britain: it is this, which leaving all the other causes of patriotism and national fervor undiminished and uninjured, has added to our public duties the same feeling of necessity, the same sense of immediate self-interest, which in other countries actuates the members of a single family in their conduct toward each other. his own House would as necessarily be included, as a single card in a house of cards! Not the landholder's: for in the general destruction of all credit, how could he obtain payment for the Produce of his Estates? Not to mention the improbability that he would remain the undisturbed Possessor in so direful a concussion-not to mention, that on him must Somewhat more than a year ago, I happened to be fall the whole weight of the public necessities-not on a visit with a friend, in a small market-town in to mention that from the merchant's credit depends the South-West of England, when one of the compa- the ever-increasing value of his land and the readiest ny turned the conversation to the weight of Taxes means of improving it. Neither could it be the laboand the consequent hardness of the times. I answer-rer's interest: for he must be either thrown out of ed, that if the Taxes were a real weight, and that in proportion to their amount, we must have been ruined long ago: for Mr. Hume, who had proceeded, as on a self-evident axiom, on the hypothesis, that a debt of a nation was the same as a debt of an individual, had declared our ruin arithmetically demonstrable, if the national debt increased beyond a certain sum. Since his time it has more than quintupled that sum, and yet-True, answered my Friend, but the principle might be right though he might have been mistaken in the time. But still, I rejoined, if the principle were right, the nearer we came to that given point, and the greater and the more active the pernicious cause became, the more manifest would its effects be. We might not be absolutely ruined, but our embarrassments would increase in some proportion to their cause. Whereas instead of being poorer and poorer, we are richer and richer. Will any man in his senses contend, that the actual labor and produce of the country has not only been decupled within half a century, but increased so prodigiously beyond that decuple as to make six hundred millions a less weight to us than fifty millions were in the days of our grandfathers? But if it really be so, to what can we attribute this stupendous progression of national improvement, but to that system of credit and paper currency, of which the National Debt is both the reservoir and the water-works? A constant cause should have constant effects; but if you deem that this is some anomaly, some strange exception to the general rule, explain its mode of operation, make it comprehensible, how a cause acting on a whole nation can produce a regular and rapid increase of prosperity to a certain point, and then all at once pass from an Angel of Light into a Demon of Destruction? That an individual house may live more and more luxuriously upon borrowed funds, and that when the suspicions of the creditors are awakened, and their patience exhausted, the luxurious spendthrift may all at once exchange his Palace for a Prison-this I can understand perfectly: for I understand, whence the luxuries could be produced for the consumption of the individual house, and who the creditors might be, and that it might be both their inclination and their interests to demand the debt, and to punish the insolvent Debtor. But who are a Nation's Creditors? The answer is, every Man to every Man. Whose possible interest could it be either to demand the Principal, or to refuse his share toward the means of paying the Interest? Not the Merchant's: for he would but provoke a crash of Bankruptcy, in which employ, and lie like the fish in the bed of a River from which the water has been diverted, or have the value of his labor reduced to nothing by the irruption of eager competitors. But least of all could it be the wish of the lovers of liberty, which must needs perish or be suspended, either by the horrors of anarchy, or by the absolute Power, with which the Government must be invested, in order to prevent them. In short, with the exception of men desperate from guilt or debt, or mad with the blackest ambition, there is no class or description of men who can have the least Interest in producing or permitting a Bankruptcy. If then, neither experience has acquainted us with any national impoverishment or embarrassment from the increase of National Debt, nor theory renders such effects comprehensible, (for the predictions of Hume went on the false assumption, that a part only of the Nation was interested in the preservation of the Public Credit) on what authority are we to ground our apprehensions? Does History record a single Nation, in which relatively to Taxation there were no privileged or exempted classes, in which there were no compulsory prices of labor, and in which the interest of all the different classes and all the different districts, were mutually dependent and vitally co-organized, as in Great Britain-has History, I say, recorded a single instance of such a Nation ruined or dissolved by the weight of Taxation? In France there was no public credit, no communion of Interests: its unprincipled Government and the productive and taxable Classes were as two Individuals with separate Interests. Its Bankruptcy and the con. sequences of it are sufficiently comprehensible. Yet the Cahiers, or the instructions and complaints sent to the National Assembly, from the Towns and Provinces of France, (an immense mass of documents indeed, but without examination and patient perusal of which, no man is entitled to write a History of the French Revolution) these proved, beyond contradiction, that the amount of the Taxes was one only, and that a subordinate cause of the revolutionary movement. Indeed, if the amount of the Taxes could be disjoined from the mode of raising them, it might be fairly denied to have been a cause at all. Holland was taxed as heavily and as equally as ourselves; but was it by Taxation that Holland was reduced to its present miseries? The mode in which Taxes are supposed to act on the marketableness of our manufactures in foreign marts, I shall examine on some future occasion, when I shall endeavor to explain in a more satisfactory way |