text:
PubDate: 1792-02-01
Slug: major-works/rights-of-man-part-the-second
Title: Rights of Man Part the Second
Date: Mon Aug  4 09:08:53 EDT 2014

   Combining Principle And Practice

   To M. de la Fayette

   After an acquaintance of nearly fifteen years in difficult situations in
   America, and various consultations in Europe, I feel a pleasure in
   presenting to you this small treatise, in gratitude for your services to
   my beloved America, and as a testimony of my esteem for the virtues,
   public and private, which I know you to possess.

   The only point upon which I could ever discover that we differed was not
   as to principles of government, but as to time. For my own part I think it
   equally as injurious to good principles to permit them to linger, as to
   push them on too fast. That which you suppose accomplishable in fourteen
   or fifteen years, I may believe practicable in a much shorter period.
   Mankind, as it appears to me, are always ripe enough to understand their
   true interest, provided it be presented clearly to their understanding,
   and that in a manner not to create suspicion by anything like self-design,
   nor offend by assuming too much. Where we would wish to reform we must not
   reproach.

   When the American revolution was established I felt a disposition to sit
   serenely down and enjoy the calm. It did not appear to me that any object
   could afterwards arise great enough to make me quit tranquility and feel
   as I had felt before. But when principle, and not place, is the energetic
   cause of action, a man, I find, is everywhere the same.

   I am now once more in the public world; and as I have not a right to
   contemplate on so many years of remaining life as you have, I have
   resolved to labour as fast as I can; and as I am anxious for your aid and
   your company, I wish you to hasten your principles and overtake me.

   If you make a campaign the ensuing spring, which it is most probable there
   will be no occasion for, I will come and join you. Should the campaign
   commence, I hope it will terminate in the extinction of German despotism,
   and in establishing the freedom of all Germany. When France shall be
   surrounded with revolutions she will be in peace and safety, and her
   taxes, as well as those of Germany, will consequently become less.

   Your sincere,

   Affectionate Friend,
   THOMAS PAINE

   LONDON, Feb. 9, 1792

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   Preface

   When I began the chapter entitled the "Conclusion" in the former part of
   the Rights Of Man, published last year, it was my intention to have
   extended it to a greater length; but in casting the whole matter in my
   mind, which I wish to add, I found that it must either make the work too
   bulky, or contract my plan too much. I therefore brought it to a close as
   soon as the subject would admit, and reserved what I had further to say to
   another opportunity.

   Several other reasons contributed to produce this determination. I wished
   to know the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and
   expression different to what had been customary in England, would be
   received before I proceeded farther. A great field was opening to the view
   of mankind by means of the French Revolution. Mr. Burke's outrageous
   opposition thereto brought the controversy into England. He attacked
   principles which he knew (from information) I would contest with him,
   because they are principles I believe to be good, and which I have
   contributed to establish, and conceive myself bound to defend. Had he not
   urged the controversy, I had most probably been a silent man.

   Another reason for deferring the remainder of the work was, that Mr. Burke
   promised in his first publication to renew the subject at another
   opportunity, and to make a comparison of what he called the English and
   French Constitutions. I therefore held myself in reserve for him. He has
   published two works since, without doing this: which he certainly would
   not have omitted, had the comparison been in his favour.

   In his last work, his "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," he has
   quoted about ten pages from the Rights Of Man, and having given himself
   the trouble of doing this, says he "shall not attempt in the smallest
   degree to refute them," meaning the principles therein contained. I am
   enough acquainted with Mr. Burke to know that he would if he could. But
   instead of contesting them, he immediately after consoles himself with
   saying that "he has done his part."- He has not done his part. He has not
   performed his promise of a comparison of constitutions. He started the
   controversy, he gave the challenge, and has fled from it; and he is now a
   case in point with his own opinion that "the age of chivalry is gone!"

   The title, as well as the substance of his last work, his "Appeal," is his
   condemnation. Principles must stand on their own merits, and if they are
   good they certainly will. To put them under the shelter of other men's
   authority, as Mr. Burke has done, serves to bring them into suspicion. Mr.
   Burke is not very fond of dividing his honours, but in this case he is
   artfully dividing the disgrace.

   But who are those to whom Mr. Burke has made his appeal? A set of childish
   thinkers, and half-way politicians born in the last century, men who went
   no farther with any principle than as it suited their purposes as a party;
   the nation was always left out of the question; and this has been the
   character of every party from that day to this. The nation sees nothing of
   such works, or such politics, worthy its attention. A little matter will
   move a party, but it must be something great that moves a nation.

   Though I see nothing in Mr. Burke's "Appeal" worth taking much notice of,
   there is, however, one expression upon which I shall offer a few remarks.
   After quoting largely from the Rights Of Man, and declining to contest the
   principles contained in that work, he says: "This will most probably be
   done (if such writings shall be thought to deserve any other refutation
   than that of criminal justice) by others, who may think with Mr. Burke and
   with the same zeal."

   In the first place, it has not yet been done by anybody. Not less, I
   believe, than eight or ten pamphlets intended as answers to the former
   part of the Rights Of Man have been published by different persons, and
   not one of them to my knowledge, has extended to a second edition, nor are
   even the titles of them so much as generally remembered. As I am averse to
   unnecessary multiplying publications, I have answered none of them. And as
   I believe that a man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else
   can do it, I am careful to avoid that rock.

   But as I would decline unnecessary publications on the one hand, so would
   I avoid everything that might appear like sullen pride on the other. If
   Mr. Burke, or any person on his side the question, will produce an answer
   to the Rights Of Man that shall extend to a half, or even to a fourth part
   of the number of copies to which the Rights Of Man extended, I will reply
   to his work. But until this be done, I shall so far take the sense of the
   public for my guide (and the world knows I am not a flatterer) that what
   they do not think worth while to read, is not worth mine to answer. I
   suppose the number of copies to which the first part of the Rights Of Man
   extended, taking England, Scotland, and Ireland, is not less than between
   forty and fifty thousand.

   I now come to remark on the remaining part of the quotation I have made
   from Mr. Burke.

   "If," says he, "such writings shall be thought to deserve any other
   refutation than that of criminal justice."

   Pardoning the pun, it must be criminal justice indeed that should condemn
   a work as a substitute for not being able to refute it. The greatest
   condemnation that could be passed upon it would be a refutation. But in
   proceeding by the method Mr. Burke alludes to, the condemnation would, in
   the final event, pass upon the criminality of the process and not upon the
   work, and in this case, I had rather be the author, than be either the
   judge or the jury that should condemn it.

   But to come at once to the point. I have differed from some professional
   gentlemen on the subject of prosecutions, and I since find they are
   falling into my opinion, which I will here state as fully, but as
   concisely as I can.

   I will first put a case with respect to any law, and then compare it with
   a government, or with what in England is, or has been, called a
   constitution.

   It would be an act of despotism, or what in England is called arbitrary
   power, to make a law to prohibit investigating the principles, good or
   bad, on which such a law, or any other is founded.

   If a law be bad it is one thing to oppose the practice of it, but it is
   quite a different thing to expose its errors, to reason on its defects,
   and to show cause why it should be repealed, or why another ought to be
   substituted in its place. I have always held it an opinion (making it also
   my practice) that it is better to obey a bad law, making use at the same
   time of every argument to show its errors and procure its repeal, than
   forcibly to violate it; because the precedent of breaking a bad law might
   weaken the force, and lead to a discretionary violation, of those which
   are good.

   The case is the same with respect to principles and forms of government,
   or to what are called constitutions and the parts of which they are,
   composed.

   It is for the good of nations and not for the emolument or aggrandisement
   of particular individuals, that government ought to be established, and
   that mankind are at the expense of supporting it. The defects of every
   government and constitution both as to principle and form, must, on a
   parity of reasoning, be as open to discussion as the defects of a law, and
   it is a duty which every man owes to society to point them out. When those
   defects, and the means of remedying them, are generally seen by a nation,
   that nation will reform its government or its constitution in the one
   case, as the government repealed or reformed the law in the other. The
   operation of government is restricted to the making and the administering
   of laws; but it is to a nation that the right of forming or reforming,
   generating or regenerating constitutions and governments belong; and
   consequently those subjects, as subjects of investigation, are always
   before a country as a matter of right, and cannot, without invading the
   general rights of that country, be made subjects for prosecution. On this
   ground I will meet Mr. Burke whenever he please. It is better that the
   whole argument should come out than to seek to stifle it. It was himself
   that opened the controversy, and he ought not to desert it.

   I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years
   longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe. If better reasons
   can be shown for them than against them, they will stand; if the contrary,
   they will not. Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or
   they shall not read; and publications that go no farther than to
   investigate principles of government, to invite men to reason and to
   reflect, and to show the errors and excellences of different systems, have
   a right to appear. If they do not excite attention, they are not worth the
   trouble of a prosecution; and if they do, the prosecution will amount to
   nothing, since it cannot amount to a prohibition of reading. This would be
   a sentence on the public, instead of the author, and would also be the
   most effectual mode of making or hastening revolution.

   On all cases that apply universally to a nation, with respect to systems
   of government, a jury of twelve men is not competent to decide. Where
   there are no witnesses to be examined, no facts to be proved, and where
   the whole matter is before the whole public, and the merits or demerits of
   it resting on their opinion; and where there is nothing to be known in a
   court, but what every body knows out of it, every twelve men is equally as
   good a jury as the other, and would most probably reverse each other's
   verdict; or, from the variety of their opinions, not be able to form one.
   It is one case, whether a nation approve a work, or a plan; but it is
   quite another case, whether it will commit to any such jury the power of
   determining whether that nation have a right to, or shall reform its
   government or not. I mention those cases that Mr. Burke may see I have not
   written on Government without reflecting on what is Law, as well as on
   what are Rights.- The only effectual jury in such cases would be a
   convention of the whole nation fairly elected; for in all such cases the
   whole nation is the vicinage. If Mr. Burke will propose such a jury, I
   will waive all privileges of being the citizen of another country, and,
   defending its principles, abide the issue, provided he will do the same;
   for my opinion is, that his work and his principles would be condemned
   instead of mine.

   As to the prejudices which men have from education and habit, in favour of
   any particular form or system of government, those prejudices have yet to
   stand the test of reason and reflection. In fact, such prejudices are
   nothing. No man is prejudiced in favour of a thing, knowing it to be
   wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he
   sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone. We have but a defective
   idea of what prejudice is. It might be said, that until men think for
   themselves the whole is prejudice, and not opinion; for that only is
   opinion which is the result of reason and reflection. I offer this remark,
   that Mr. Burke may not confide too much in what have been the customary
   prejudices of the country.

   I do not believe that the people of England have ever been fairly and
   candidly dealt by. They have been imposed upon by parties, and by men
   assuming the character of leaders. It is time that the nation should rise
   above those trifles. It is time to dismiss that inattention which has so
   long been the encouraging cause of stretching taxation to excess. It is
   time to dismiss all those songs and toasts which are calculated to
   enslave, and operate to suffocate reflection. On all such subjects men
   have but to think, and they will neither act wrong nor be misled. To say
   that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice,
   and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not. If such a case
   could be proved, it would equally prove that those who govern are not fit
   to govern them, for they are a part of the same national mass.

   But admitting governments to be changed all over Europe; it certainly may
   be done without convulsion or revenge. It is not worth making changes or
   revolutions, unless it be for some great national benefit: and when this
   shall appear to a nation, the danger will be, as in America and France, to
   those who oppose; and with this reflection I close my Preface.

   THOMAS PAINE

   LONDON, Feb. 9, 1792

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   Introduction

   What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers, may be applied to Reason
   and Liberty. "Had we," said he, "a place to stand upon, we might raise the
   world."

   The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in
   mechanics. So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and
   so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established
   itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or
   Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted
   round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of
   fear had made men afraid to think.

   But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,- and all
   it wants,- is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to
   distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments
   display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began
   to contemplate redress.

   The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from
   England, would have been a matter but of little importance, had it not
   been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of
   governments. She made a stand, not for herself only, but for the world,
   and looked beyond the advantages herself could receive. Even the Hessian,
   though hired to fight against her, may live to bless his defeat; and
   England, condemning the viciousness of its government, rejoice in its
   miscarriage.

   As America was the only spot in the political world where the principle of
   universal reformation could begin, so also was it the best in the natural
   world. An assemblage of circumstances conspired, not only to give birth,
   but to add gigantic maturity to its principles. The scene which that
   country presents to the eye of a spectator, has something in it which
   generates and encourages great ideas. Nature appears to him in magnitude.
   The mighty objects he beholds, act upon his mind by enlarging it, and he
   partakes of the greatness he contemplates.- Its first settlers were
   emigrants from different European nations, and of diversified professions
   of religion, retiring from the governmental persecutions of the old world,
   and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but as brothers. The wants which
   necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them
   a state of society, which countries long harassed by the quarrels and
   intrigues of governments, had neglected to cherish. In such a situation
   man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea
   of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and the example shows to the
   artificial world, that man must go back to Nature for information.

   From the rapid progress which America makes in every species of
   improvement, it is rational to conclude that, if the governments of Asia,
   Africa, and Europe had begun on a principle similar to that of America, or
   had not been very early corrupted therefrom, those countries must by this
   time have been in a far superior condition to what they are. Age after age
   has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness.
   Could we suppose a spectator who knew nothing of the world, and who was
   put into it merely to make his observations, he would take a great part of
   the old world to be new, just struggling with the difficulties and
   hardships of an infant settlement. He could not suppose that the hordes of
   miserable poor with which old countries abound could be any other than
   those who had not yet had time to provide for themselves. Little would he
   think they were the consequence of what in such countries they call
   government.

   If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which
   are in an advanced stage of improvement we still find the greedy hand of
   government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and
   grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to
   furnish new pretences for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as
   its prey, and permits none to escape without a tribute.

   As revolutions have begun (and as the probability is always greater
   against a thing beginning, than of proceeding after it has begun), it is
   natural to expect that other revolutions will follow. The amazing and
   still increasing expenses with which old governments are conducted, the
   numerous wars they engage in or provoke, the embarrassments they throw in
   the way of universal civilisation and commerce, and the oppression and
   usurpation acted at home, have wearied out the patience, and exhausted the
   property of the world. In such a situation, and with such examples already
   existing, revolutions are to be looked for. They are become subjects of
   universal conversation, and may be considered as the Order of the day.

   If systems of government can be introduced less expensive and more
   productive of general happiness than those which have existed, all
   attempts to oppose their progress will in the end be fruitless. Reason,
   like time, will make its own way, and prejudice will fall in a combat with
   interest. If universal peace, civilisation, and commerce are ever to be
   the happy lot of man, it cannot be accomplished but by a revolution in the
   system of governments. All the monarchical governments are military. War
   is their trade, plunder and revenue their objects. While such governments
   continue, peace has not the absolute security of a day. What is the
   history of all monarchical governments but a disgustful picture of human
   wretchedness, and the accidental respite of a few years' repose? Wearied
   with war, and tired with human butchery, they sat down to rest, and called
   it peace. This certainly is not the condition that heaven intended for
   man; and if this be monarchy, well might monarchy be reckoned among the
   sins of the Jews.

   The revolutions which formerly took place in the world had nothing in them
   that interested the bulk of mankind. They extended only to a change of
   persons and measures, but not of principles, and rose or fell among the
   common transactions of the moment. What we now behold may not improperly
   be called a "counter-revolution." Conquest and tyranny, at some earlier
   period, dispossessed man of his rights, and he is now recovering them. And
   as the tide of all human affairs has its ebb and flow in directions
   contrary to each other, so also is it in this. Government founded on a
   moral theory, on a system of universal peace, on the indefeasible
   hereditary Rights of Man, is now revolving from west to east by a stronger
   impulse than the government of the sword revolved from east to west. It
   interests not particular individuals, but nations in its progress, and
   promises a new era to the human race.

   The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed is that of
   attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the
   advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
   Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation, has been
   absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government.
   Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the
   mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has
   the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by
   pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the
   general character of man, the merits that appertain to him as a social
   being.

   It may therefore be of use in this day of revolutions to discriminate
   between those things which are the effect of government, and those which
   are not. This will best be done by taking a review of society and
   civilisation, and the consequences resulting therefrom, as things distinct
   from what are called governments. By beginning with this investigation, we
   shall be able to assign effects to their proper causes and analyse the
   mass of common errors.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   CHAPTER I

   Of Society and Civilisation

   Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of
   government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural
   constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if
   the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and
   reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised
   community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which
   holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the
   merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which
   each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest
   regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common
   usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In
   fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to
   government.

   To understand the nature and quantity of government proper for man, it is
   necessary to attend to his character. As Nature created him for social
   life, she fitted him for the station she intended. In all cases she made
   his natural wants greater than his individual powers. No one man is
   capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those
   wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society,
   as naturally as gravitation acts to a centre.

   But she has gone further. She has not only forced man into society by a
   diversity of wants which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but
   she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not
   necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no
   period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and
   ends with our being.

   If we examine with attention into the composition and constitution of man,
   the diversity of his wants, and the diversity of talents in different men
   for reciprocally accommodating the wants of each other, his propensity to
   society, and consequently to preserve the advantages resulting from it, we
   shall easily discover, that a great part of what is called government is
   mere imposition.

   Government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which
   society and civilisation are not conveniently competent; and instances are
   not wanting to show, that everything which government can usefully add
   thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without
   government.

   For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to
   a longer period in several of the American States, there were no
   established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished,
   and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention
   in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and
   harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. There is
   a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a
   greater variety of abilities and resource, to accommodate itself to
   whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished,
   society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common
   interest produces common security.

   So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of
   any formal government is the dissolution of society, that it acts by a
   contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together. All that part
   of its organisation which it had committed to its government, devolves
   again upon itself, and acts through its medium. When men, as well from
   natural instinct as from reciprocal benefits, have habituated themselves
   to social and civilised life, there is always enough of its principles in
   practice to carry them through any changes they may find necessary or
   convenient to make in their government. In short, man is so naturally a
   creature of society that it is almost impossible to put him out of it.

   Formal government makes but a small part of civilised life; and when even
   the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it is a thing more
   in name and idea than in fact. It is to the great and fundamental
   principles of society and civilisation- to the common usage universally
   consented to, and mutually and reciprocally maintained- to the unceasing
   circulation of interest, which, passing through its million channels,
   invigorates the whole mass of civilised man- it is to these things,
   infinitely more than to anything which even the best instituted government
   can perform, that the safety and prosperity of the individual and of the
   whole depends.

   The more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government,
   because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself; but
   so contrary is the practice of old governments to the reason of the case,
   that the expenses of them increase in the proportion they ought to
   diminish. It is but few general laws that civilised life requires, and
   those of such common usefulness, that whether they are enforced by the
   forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly the same. If we
   consider what the principles are that first condense men into society, and
   what are the motives that regulate their mutual intercourse afterwards, we
   shall find, by the time we arrive at what is called government, that
   nearly the whole of the business is performed by the natural operation of
   the parts upon each other.

   Man, with respect to all those matters, is more a creature of consistency
   than he is aware, or than governments would wish him to believe. All the
   great laws of society are laws of nature. Those of trade and commerce,
   whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals or of nations, are
   laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. They are followed and obeyed,
   because it is the interest of the parties so to do, and not on account of
   any formal laws their governments may impose or interpose.

   But how often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed
   by the operations of government! When the latter, instead of being
   ingrafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself,
   and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of
   the mischiefs it ought to prevent.

   If we look back to the riots and tumults which at various times have
   happened in England, we shall find that they did not proceed from the want
   of a government, but that government was itself the generating cause;
   instead of consolidating society it divided it; it deprived it of its
   natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorders which otherwise
   would not have existed. In those associations which men promiscuously form
   for the purpose of trade, or of any concern in which government is totally
   out of the question, and in which they act merely on the principles of
   society, we see how naturally the various parties unite; and this shows,
   by comparison, that governments, so far from being always the cause or
   means of order, are often the destruction of it. The riots of 1780 had no
   other source than the remains of those prejudices which the government
   itself had encouraged. But with respect to England there are also other
   causes.

   Excess and inequality of taxation, however disguised in the means, never
   fail to appear in their effects. As a great mass of the community are
   thrown thereby into poverty and discontent, they are constantly on the
   brink of commotion; and deprived, as they unfortunately are, of the means
   of information, are easily heated to outrage. Whatever the apparent cause
   of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows
   that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the
   felicity by which society is to be preserved.

   But as a fact is superior to reasoning, the instance of America presents
   itself to confirm these observations. If there is a country in the world
   where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected,
   it is America. Made up as it is of people from different nations,*[16]
   accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different
   languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear
   that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple
   operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the
   rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought
   into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not
   privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a
   court rioting at its expense. Their taxes are few, because their
   government is just: and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there
   is nothing to engender riots and tumults.

   A metaphysical man, like Mr. Burke, would have tortured his invention to
   discover how such a people could be governed. He would have supposed that
   some must be managed by fraud, others by force, and all by some
   contrivance; that genius must be hired to impose upon ignorance, and show
   and parade to fascinate the vulgar. Lost in the abundance of his
   researches, he would have resolved and re-resolved, and finally overlooked
   the plain and easy road that lay directly before him.

   One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been, that it
   led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the imposition, of
   governments. All the revolutions till then had been worked within the
   atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of a nation. The
   parties were always of the class of courtiers; and whatever was their rage
   for reformation, they carefully preserved the fraud of the profession.

   In all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up of
   mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from the
   understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial to know,
   namely, That government is nothing more than a national association adding
   on the principles of society.

   Having thus endeavoured to show that the social and civilised state of man
   is capable of performing within itself almost everything necessary to its
   protection and government, it will be proper, on the other hand, to take a
   review of the present old governments, and examine whether their
   principles and practice are correspondent thereto.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   CHAPTER II

   Of the Origin of the Present Old Governments

   It is impossible that such governments as have hitherto existed in the
   world, could have commenced by any other means than a total violation of
   every principle sacred and moral. The obscurity in which the origin of all
   the present old governments is buried, implies the iniquity and disgrace
   with which they began. The origin of the present government of America and
   France will ever be remembered, because it is honourable to record it; but
   with respect to the rest, even Flattery has consigned them to the tomb of
   time, without an inscription.

   It could have been no difficult thing in the early and solitary ages of
   the world, while the chief employment of men was that of attending flocks
   and herds, for a banditti of ruffians to overrun a country, and lay it
   under contributions. Their power being thus established, the chief of the
   band contrived to lose the name of Robber in that of Monarch; and hence
   the origin of Monarchy and Kings.

   The origin of the Government of England, so far as relates to what is
   called its line of monarchy, being one of the latest, is perhaps the best
   recorded. The hatred which the Norman invasion and tyranny begat, must
   have been deeply rooted in the nation, to have outlived the contrivance to
   obliterate it. Though not a courtier will talk of the curfew-bell, not a
   village in England has forgotten it.

   Those bands of robbers having parcelled out the world, and divided it into
   dominions, began, as is naturally the case, to quarrel with each other.
   What at first was obtained by violence was considered by others as lawful
   to be taken, and a second plunderer succeeded the first. They alternately
   invaded the dominions which each had assigned to himself, and the
   brutality with which they treated each other explains the original
   character of monarchy. It was ruffian torturing ruffian. The conqueror
   considered the conquered, not as his prisoner, but his property. He led
   him in triumph rattling in chains, and doomed him, at pleasure, to slavery
   or death. As time obliterated the history of their beginning, their
   successors assumed new appearances, to cut off the entail of their
   disgrace, but their principles and objects remained the same. What at
   first was plunder, assumed the softer name of revenue; and the power
   originally usurped, they affected to inherit.

   From such beginning of governments, what could be expected but a continued
   system of war and extortion? It has established itself into a trade. The
   vice is not peculiar to one more than to another, but is the common
   principle of all. There does not exist within such governments sufficient
   stamina whereon to engraft reformation; and the shortest and most
   effectual remedy is to begin anew on the ground of the nation.

   What scenes of horror, what perfection of iniquity, present themselves in
   contemplating the character and reviewing the history of such governments!
   If we would delineate human nature with a baseness of heart and hypocrisy
   of countenance that reflection would shudder at and humanity disown, it is
   kings, courts and cabinets that must sit for the portrait. Man, naturally
   as he is, with all his faults about him, is not up to the character.

   Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right
   principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world
   could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it?
   What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside
   his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or
   what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any
   class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man's estate, or
   raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and
   taxes the never-failing consequence?- Though this reasoning may be good to
   a nation, it is not so to a government. War is the Pharo-table of
   governments, and nations the dupes of the game.

   If there is anything to wonder at in this miserable scene of governments
   more than might be expected, it is the progress which the peaceful arts of
   agriculture, manufacture and commerce have made beneath such a long
   accumulating load of discouragement and oppression. It serves to show that
   instinct in animals does not act with stronger impulse than the principles
   of society and civilisation operate in man. Under all discouragements, he
   pursues his object, and yields to nothing but impossibilities.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   CHAPTER III

   Of the Old and New Systems of Government

   Nothing can appear more contradictory than the principles on which the old
   governments began, and the condition to which society, civilisation and
   commerce are capable of carrying mankind. Government, on the old system,
   is an assumption of power, for the aggrandisement of itself; on the new, a
   delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports
   itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of
   peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages
   national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of
   universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of
   revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity
   of taxes it requires.

   Mr. Burke has talked of old and new whigs. If he can amuse himself with
   childish names and distinctions, I shall not interrupt his pleasure. It is
   not to him, but to the Abbe Sieyes, that I address this chapter. I am
   already engaged to the latter gentleman to discuss the subject of
   monarchical government; and as it naturally occurs in comparing the old
   and new systems, I make this the opportunity of presenting to him my
   observations. I shall occasionally take Mr. Burke in my way.

   Though it might be proved that the system of government now called the
   new, is the most ancient in principle of all that have existed, being
   founded on the original, inherent Rights of Man: yet, as tyranny and the
   sword have suspended the exercise of those rights for many centuries past,
   it serves better the purpose of distinction to call it the new, than to
   claim the right of calling it the old.

   The first general distinction between those two systems, is, that the one
   now called the old is hereditary, either in whole or in part; and the new
   is entirely representative. It rejects all hereditary government:

   First, As being an imposition on mankind.

   Secondly, As inadequate to the purposes for which government is necessary.

   With respect to the first of these heads- It cannot be proved by what
   right hereditary government could begin; neither does there exist within
   the compass of mortal power a right to establish it. Man has no authority
   over posterity in matters of personal right; and, therefore, no man, or
   body of men, had, or can have, a right to set up hereditary government.
   Were even ourselves to come again into existence, instead of being
   succeeded by posterity, we have not now the right of taking from ourselves
   the rights which would then be ours. On what ground, then, do we pretend
   to take them from others?

   All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny. An heritable crown, or
   an heritable throne, or by what other fanciful name such things may be
   called, have no other significant explanation than that mankind are
   heritable property. To inherit a government, is to inherit the people, as
   if they were flocks and herds.

   With respect to the second head, that of being inadequate to the purposes
   for which government is necessary, we have only to consider what
   government essentially is, and compare it with the circumstances to which
   hereditary succession is subject.

   Government ought to be a thing always in full maturity. It ought to be so
   constructed as to be superior to all the accidents to which individual man
   is subject; and, therefore, hereditary succession, by being subject to
   them all, is the most irregular and imperfect of all the systems of
   government.

   We have heard the Rights of Man called a levelling system; but the only
   system to which the word levelling is truly applicable, is the hereditary
   monarchical system. It is a system of mental levelling. It
   indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority.
   Vice and virtue, ignorance and wisdom, in short, every quality good or
   bad, is put on the same level. Kings succeed each other, not as rationals,
   but as animals. It signifies not what their mental or moral characters
   are. Can we then be surprised at the abject state of the human mind in
   monarchical countries, when the government itself is formed on such an
   abject levelling system?- It has no fixed character. To-day it is one
   thing; to-morrow it is something else. It changes with the temper of every
   succeeding individual, and is subject to all the varieties of each. It is
   government through the medium of passions and accidents. It appears under
   all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at
   nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. It reverses the wholesome order
   of nature. It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of
   nonage over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive a more
   ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession, in all its
   cases, presents.

   Could it be made a decree in nature, or an edict registered in heaven, and
   man could know it, that virtue and wisdom should invariably appertain to
   hereditary succession, the objection to it would be removed; but when we
   see that nature acts as if she disowned and sported with the hereditary
   system; that the mental character of successors, in all countries, is
   below the average of human understanding; that one is a tyrant, another an
   idiot, a third insane, and some all three together, it is impossible to
   attach confidence to it, when reason in man has power to act.

   It is not to the Abbe Sieyes that I need apply this reasoning; he has
   already saved me that trouble by giving his own opinion upon the case. "If
   it be asked," says he, "what is my opinion with respect to hereditary
   right, I answer without hesitation, That in good theory, an hereditary
   transmission of any power of office, can never accord with the laws of a
   true representation. Hereditaryship is, in this sense, as much an attaint
   upon principle, as an outrage upon society. But let us," continues he,
   "refer to the history of all elective monarchies and principalities: is
   there one in which the elective mode is not worse than the hereditary
   succession?"

   As to debating on which is the worst of the two, it is admitting both to
   be bad; and herein we are agreed. The preference which the Abbe has given,
   is a condemnation of the thing that he prefers. Such a mode of reasoning
   on such a subject is inadmissible, because it finally amounts to an
   accusation upon Providence, as if she had left to man no other choice with
   respect to government than between two evils, the best of which he admits
   to be "an attaint upon principle, and an outrage upon society."

   Passing over, for the present, all the evils and mischiefs which monarchy
   has occasioned in the world, nothing can more effectually prove its
   uselessness in a state of civil government, than making it hereditary.
   Would we make any office hereditary that required wisdom and abilities to
   fill it? And where wisdom and abilities are not necessary, such an office,
   whatever it may be, is superfluous or insignificant.

   Hereditary succession is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most
   ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot
   may fill. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a
   king requires only the animal figure of man- a sort of breathing
   automaton. This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it
   cannot long resist the awakened reason and interest of man.

   As to Mr. Burke, he is a stickler for monarchy, not altogether as a
   pensioner, if he is one, which I believe, but as a political man. He has
   taken up a contemptible opinion of mankind, who, in their turn, are taking
   up the same of him. He considers them as a herd of beings that must be
   governed by fraud, effigy, and show; and an idol would be as good a figure
   of monarchy with him, as a man. I will, however, do him the justice to say
   that, with respect to America, he has been very complimentary. He always
   contended, at least in my hearing, that the people of America were more
   enlightened than those of England, or of any country in Europe; and that
   therefore the imposition of show was not necessary in their governments.

   Though the comparison between hereditary and elective monarchy, which the
   Abbe has made, is unnecessary to the case, because the representative
   system rejects both: yet, were I to make the comparison, I should decide
   contrary to what he has done.

   The civil wars which have originated from contested hereditary claims, are
   more numerous, and have been more dreadful, and of longer continuance,
   than those which have been occasioned by election. All the civil wars in
   France arose from the hereditary system; they were either produced by
   hereditary claims, or by the imperfection of the hereditary form, which
   admits of regencies or monarchy at nurse. With respect to England, its
   history is full of the same misfortunes. The contests for succession
   between the houses of York and Lancaster lasted a whole century; and
   others of a similar nature have renewed themselves since that period.
   Those of 1715 and 1745 were of the same kind. The succession war for the
   crown of Spain embroiled almost half Europe. The disturbances of Holland
   are generated from the hereditaryship of the Stadtholder. A government
   calling itself free, with an hereditary office, is like a thorn in the
   flesh, that produces a fermentation which endeavours to discharge it.

   But I might go further, and place also foreign wars, of whatever kind, to
   the same cause. It is by adding the evil of hereditary succession to that
   of monarchy, that a permanent family interest is created, whose constant
   objects are dominion and revenue. Poland, though an elective monarchy, has
   had fewer wars than those which are hereditary; and it is the only
   government that has made a voluntary essay, though but a small one, to
   reform the condition of the country.

   Having thus glanced at a few of the defects of the old, or hereditary
   systems of government, let us compare it with the new, or representative
   system.

   The representative system takes society and civilisation for its basis;
   nature, reason, and experience, for its guide.

   Experience, in all ages, and in all countries, has demonstrated that it is
   impossible to control Nature in her distribution of mental powers. She
   gives them as she pleases. Whatever is the rule by which she, apparently
   to us, scatters them among mankind, that rule remains a secret to man. It
   would be as ridiculous to attempt to fix the hereditaryship of human
   beauty, as of wisdom. Whatever wisdom constituently is, it is like a
   seedless plant; it may be reared when it appears, but it cannot be
   voluntarily produced. There is always a sufficiency somewhere in the
   general mass of society for all purposes; but with respect to the parts of
   society, it is continually changing its place. It rises in one to-day, in
   another to-morrow, and has most probably visited in rotation every family
   of the earth, and again withdrawn.

   As this is in the order of nature, the order of government must
   necessarily follow it, or government will, as we see it does, degenerate
   into ignorance. The hereditary system, therefore, is as repugnant to human
   wisdom as to human rights; and is as absurd as it is unjust.

   As the republic of letters brings forward the best literary productions,
   by giving to genius a fair and universal chance; so the representative
   system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by
   collecting wisdom from where it can be found. I smile to myself when I
   contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all
   the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carry the same
   idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an
   hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will
   venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished,
   those sons could not have completed them.

   Do we need a stronger evidence of the absurdity of hereditary government
   than is seen in the descendants of those men, in any line of life, who
   once were famous? Is there scarcely an instance in which there is not a
   total reverse of the character? It appears as if the tide of mental
   faculties flowed as far as it could in certain channels, and then forsook
   its course, and arose in others. How irrational then is the hereditary
   system, which establishes channels of power, in company with which wisdom
   refuses to flow! By continuing this absurdity, man is perpetually in
   contradiction with himself; he accepts, for a king, or a chief magistrate,
   or a legislator, a person whom he would not elect for a constable.

   It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and
   talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is
   existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which,
   unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that
   condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the
   whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government
   ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation,
   all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.

   This cannot take place in the insipid state of hereditary government, not
   only because it prevents, but because it operates to benumb. When the mind
   of a nation is bowed down by any political superstition in its government,
   such as hereditary succession is, it loses a considerable portion of its
   powers on all other subjects and objects. Hereditary succession requires
   the same obedience to ignorance, as to wisdom; and when once the mind can
   bring itself to pay this indiscriminate reverence, it descends below the
   stature of mental manhood. It is fit to be great only in little things. It
   acts a treachery upon itself, and suffocates the sensations that urge the
   detection.

   Though the ancient governments present to us a miserable picture of the
   condition of man, there is one which above all others exempts itself from
   the general description. I mean the democracy of the Athenians. We see
   more to admire, and less to condemn, in that great, extraordinary people,
   than in anything which history affords.

   Mr. Burke is so little acquainted with constituent principles of
   government, that he confounds democracy and representation together.
   Representation was a thing unknown in the ancient democracies. In those
   the mass of the people met and enacted laws (grammatically speaking) in
   the first person. Simple democracy was no other than the common hall of
   the ancients. It signifies the form, as well as the public principle of
   the government. As those democracies increased in population, and the
   territory extended, the simple democratical form became unwieldy and
   impracticable; and as the system of representation was not known, the
   consequence was, they either degenerated convulsively into monarchies, or
   became absorbed into such as then existed. Had the system of
   representation been then understood, as it now is, there is no reason to
   believe that those forms of government, now called monarchical or
   aristocratical, would ever have taken place. It was the want of some
   method to consolidate the parts of society, after it became too populous,
   and too extensive for the simple democratical form, and also the lax and
   solitary condition of shepherds and herdsmen in other parts of the world,
   that afforded opportunities to those unnatural modes of government to
   begin.

   As it is necessary to clear away the rubbish of errors, into which the
   subject of government has been thrown, I will proceed to remark on some
   others.

   It has always been the political craft of courtiers and court-governments,
   to abuse something which they called republicanism; but what republicanism
   was, or is, they never attempt to explain. let us examine a little into
   this case.

   The only forms of government are the democratical, the aristocratical, the
   monarchical, and what is now called the representative.

   What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is
   wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which
   government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed,
   Res-Publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally
   translated, the public thing. It is a word of a good original, referring
   to what ought to be the character and business of government; and in this
   sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which has a base
   original signification. It means arbitrary power in an individual person;
   in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object.

   Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in
   other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object,
   is not a good government. Republican government is no other than
   government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as
   well individually as collectively. It is not necessarily connected with
   any particular form, but it most naturally associates with the
   representative form, as being best calculated to secure the end for which
   a nation is at the expense of supporting it.

   Various forms of government have affected to style themselves a republic.
   Poland calls itself a republic, which is an hereditary aristocracy, with
   what is called an elective monarchy. Holland calls itself a republic,
   which is chiefly aristocratical, with an hereditary stadtholdership. But
   the government of America, which is wholly on the system of
   representation, is the only real Republic, in character and in practice,
   that now exists. Its government has no other object than the public
   business of the nation, and therefore it is properly a republic; and the
   Americans have taken care that this, and no other, shall always be the
   object of their government, by their rejecting everything hereditary, and
   establishing governments on the system of representation only. Those who
   have said that a republic is not a form of government calculated for
   countries of great extent, mistook, in the first place, the business of a
   government, for a form of government; for the res-publica equally
   appertains to every extent of territory and population. And, in the second
   place, if they meant anything with respect to form, it was the simple
   democratical form, such as was the mode of government in the ancient
   democracies, in which there was no representation. The case, therefore, is
   not, that a republic cannot be extensive, but that it cannot be extensive
   on the simple democratical form; and the question naturally presents
   itself, What is the best form of government for conducting the
   Res-Publica, or the Public Business of a nation, after it becomes too
   extensive and populous for the simple democratical form? It cannot be
   monarchy, because monarchy is subject to an objection of the same amount
   to which the simple democratical form was subject.

   It is possible that an individual may lay down a system of principles, on
   which government shall be constitutionally established to any extent of
   territory. This is no more than an operation of the mind, acting by its
   own powers. But the practice upon those principles, as applying to the
   various and numerous circumstances of a nation, its agriculture,
   manufacture, trade, commerce, etc., etc., a knowledge of a different kind,
   and which can be had only from the various parts of society. It is an
   assemblage of practical knowledge, which no individual can possess; and
   therefore the monarchical form is as much limited, in useful practice,
   from the incompetency of knowledge, as was the democratical form, from the
   multiplicity of population. The one degenerates, by extension, into
   confusion; the other, into ignorance and incapacity, of which all the
   great monarchies are an evidence. The monarchical form, therefore, could
   not be a substitute for the democratical, because it has equal
   inconveniences.

   Much less could it when made hereditary. This is the most effectual of all
   forms to preclude knowledge. Neither could the high democratical mind have
   voluntarily yielded itself to be governed by children and idiots, and all
   the motley insignificance of character, which attends such a mere animal
   system, the disgrace and the reproach of reason and of man.

   As to the aristocratical form, it has the same vices and defects with the
   monarchical, except that the chance of abilities is better from the
   proportion of numbers, but there is still no security for the right use
   and application of them.*[17]

   Referring them to the original simple democracy, it affords the true data
   from which government on a large scale can begin. It is incapable of
   extension, not from its principle, but from the inconvenience of its form;
   and monarchy and aristocracy, from their incapacity. Retaining, then,
   democracy as the ground, and rejecting the corrupt systems of monarchy and
   aristocracy, the representative system naturally presents itself;
   remedying at once the defects of the simple democracy as to form, and the
   incapacity of the other two with respect to knowledge.

   Simple democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary
   means. By ingrafting representation upon democracy, we arrive at a system
   of government capable of embracing and confederating all the various
   interests and every extent of territory and population; and that also with
   advantages as much superior to hereditary government, as the republic of
   letters is to hereditary literature.

   It is on this system that the American government is founded. It is
   representation ingrafted upon democracy. It has fixed the form by a scale
   parallel in all cases to the extent of the principle. What Athens was in
   miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the
   ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present. It is
   the easiest of all the forms of government to be understood and the most
   eligible in practice; and excludes at once the ignorance and insecurity of
   the hereditary mode, and the inconvenience of the simple democracy.

   It is impossible to conceive a system of government capable of acting over
   such an extent of territory, and such a circle of interests, as is
   immediately produced by the operation of representation. France, great and
   populous as it is, is but a spot in the capaciousness of the system. It is
   preferable to simple democracy even in small territories. Athens, by
   representation, would have outrivalled her own democracy.

   That which is called government, or rather that which we ought to conceive
   government to be, is no more than some common center in which all the
   parts of society unite. This cannot be accomplished by any method so
   conducive to the various interests of the community, as by the
   representative system. It concentrates the knowledge necessary to the
   interest of the parts, and of the whole. It places government in a state
   of constant maturity. It is, as has already been observed, never young,
   never old. It is subject neither to nonage, nor dotage. It is never in the
   cradle, nor on crutches. It admits not of a separation between knowledge
   and power, and is superior, as government always ought to be, to all the
   accidents of individual man, and is therefore superior to what is called
   monarchy.

   A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the
   human body; but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common
   center, in which every radius meets; and that center is formed by
   representation. To connect representation with what is called monarchy, is
   eccentric government. Representation is of itself the delegated monarchy
   of a nation, and cannot debase itself by dividing it with another.

   Mr. Burke has two or three times, in his parliamentary speeches, and in
   his publications, made use of a jingle of words that convey no ideas.
   Speaking of government, he says, "It is better to have monarchy for its
   basis, and republicanism for its corrective, than republicanism for its
   basis, and monarchy for its corrective."- If he means that it is better to
   correct folly with wisdom, than wisdom with folly, I will no otherwise
   contend with him, than that it would be much better to reject the folly
   entirely.

   But what is this thing which Mr. Burke calls monarchy? Will he explain it?
   All men can understand what representation is; and that it must
   necessarily include a variety of knowledge and talents. But what security
   is there for the same qualities on the part of monarchy? or, when the
   monarchy is a child, where then is the wisdom? What does it know about
   government? Who then is the monarch, or where is the monarchy? If it is to
   be performed by regency, it proves to be a farce. A regency is a mock
   species of republic, and the whole of monarchy deserves no better
   description. It is a thing as various as imagination can paint. It has
   none of the stable character that government ought to possess. Every
   succession is a revolution, and every regency a counter-revolution. The
   whole of it is a scene of perpetual court cabal and intrigue, of which Mr.
   Burke is himself an instance. To render monarchy consistent with
   government, the next in succession should not be born a child, but a man
   at once, and that man a Solomon. It is ridiculous that nations are to wait
   and government be interrupted till boys grow to be men.

   Whether I have too little sense to see, or too much to be imposed upon;
   whether I have too much or too little pride, or of anything else, I leave
   out of the question; but certain it is, that what is called monarchy,
   always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to
   something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of
   bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by
   any accident, the curtain happens to be open- and the company see what it
   is, they burst into laughter.

   In the representative system of government, nothing of this can happen.
   Like the nation itself, it possesses a perpetual stamina, as well of body
   as of mind, and presents itself on the open theatre of the world in a fair
   and manly manner. Whatever are its excellences or defects, they are
   visible to all. It exists not by fraud and mystery; it deals not in cant
   and sophistry; but inspires a language that, passing from heart to heart,
   is felt and understood.

   We must shut our eyes against reason, we must basely degrade our
   understanding, not to see the folly of what is called monarchy. Nature is
   orderly in all her works; but this is a mode of government that
   counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties upside
   down. It subjects age to be governed by children, and wisdom by folly.

   On the contrary, the representative system is always parallel with the
   order and immutable laws of nature, and meets the reason of man in every
   part. For example:

   In the American Federal Government, more power is delegated to the
   President of the United States than to any other individual member of
   Congress. He cannot, therefore, be elected to this office under the age of
   thirty-five years. By this time the judgment of man becomes more matured,
   and he has lived long enough to be acquainted with men and things, and the
   country with him.- But on the monarchial plan (exclusive of the numerous
   chances there are against every man born into the world, of drawing a
   prize in the lottery of human faculties), the next in succession, whatever
   he may be, is put at the head of a nation, and of a government, at the age
   of eighteen years. Does this appear like an action of wisdom? Is it
   consistent with the proper dignity and the manly character of a nation?
   Where is the propriety of calling such a lad the father of the people?- In
   all other cases, a person is a minor until the age of twenty-one years.
   Before this period, he is not trusted with the management of an acre of
   land, or with the heritable property of a flock of sheep, or an herd of
   swine; but, wonderful to tell! he may, at the age of eighteen years, be
   trusted with a nation.

   That monarchy is all a bubble, a mere court artifice to procure money, is
   evident (at least to me) in every character in which it can be viewed. It
   would be impossible, on the rational system of representative government,
   to make out a bill of expenses to such an enormous amount as this
   deception admits. Government is not of itself a very chargeable
   institution. The whole expense of the federal government of America,
   founded, as I have already said, on the system of representation, and
   extending over a country nearly ten times as large as England, is but six
   hundred thousand dollars, or one hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds
   sterling.

   I presume that no man in his sober senses will compare the character of
   any of the kings of Europe with that of General Washington. Yet, in
   France, and also in England, the expense of the civil list only, for the
   support of one man, is eight times greater than the whole expense of the
   federal government in America. To assign a reason for this, appears almost
   impossible. The generality of people in America, especially the poor, are
   more able to pay taxes, than the generality of people either in France or
   England.

   But the case is, that the representative system diffuses such a body of
   knowledge throughout a nation, on the subject of government, as to explode
   ignorance and preclude imposition. The craft of courts cannot be acted on
   that ground. There is no place for mystery; nowhere for it to begin. Those
   who are not in the representation, know as much of the nature of business
   as those who are. An affectation of mysterious importance would there be
   scouted. Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like
   those of individuals, are always their defects.

   In the representative system, the reason for everything must publicly
   appear. Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers it a
   necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest,
   because it affects his property. He examines the cost, and compares it
   with the advantages; and above all, he does not adopt the slavish custom
   of following what in other governments are called Leaders.

   It can only be by blinding the understanding of man, and making him
   believe that government is some wonderful mysterious thing, that excessive
   revenues are obtained. Monarchy is well calculated to ensure this end. It
   is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and
   quiet them into taxes.

   The government of a free country, properly speaking, is not in the
   persons, but in the laws. The enacting of those requires no great expense;
   and when they are administered, the whole of civil government is
   performed- the rest is all court contrivance.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   CHAPTER IV

   Of Constitutions

   That men mean distinct and separate things when they speak of
   constitutions and of governments, is evident; or why are those terms
   distinctly and separately used? A constitution is not the act of a
   government, but of a people constituting a government; and government
   without a constitution, is power without a right.

   All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must
   either be delegated or assumed. There are no other sources. All delegated
   power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter
   the nature and quality of either.

   In viewing this subject, the case and circumstances of America present
   themselves as in the beginning of a world; and our enquiry into the origin
   of government is shortened, by referring to the facts that have arisen in
   our own day. We have no occasion to roam for information into the obscure
   field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are brought
   at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived in the
   beginning of time. The real volume, not of history, but of facts, is
   directly before us, unmutilated by contrivance, or the errors of
   tradition.

   I will here concisely state the commencement of the American
   constitutions; by which the difference between constitutions and
   governments will sufficiently appear.

   It may not appear improper to remind the reader that the United States of
   America consist of thirteen separate states, each of which established a
   government for itself, after the declaration of independence, done the 4th
   of July, 1776. Each state acted independently of the rest, in forming its
   governments; but the same general principle pervades the whole. When the
   several state governments were formed, they proceeded to form the federal
   government, that acts over the whole in all matters which concern the
   interest of the whole, or which relate to the intercourse of the several
   states with each other, or with foreign nations. I will begin with giving
   an instance from one of the state governments (that of Pennsylvania) and
   then proceed to the federal government.

   The state of Pennsylvania, though nearly of the same extent of territory
   as England, was then divided into only twelve counties. Each of those
   counties had elected a committee at the commencement of the dispute with
   the English government; and as the city of Philadelphia, which also had
   its committee, was the most central for intelligence, it became the center
   of communication to the several country committees. When it became
   necessary to proceed to the formation of a government, the committee of
   Philadelphia proposed a conference of all the committees, to be held in
   that city, and which met the latter end of July, 1776.

   Though these committees had been duly elected by the people, they were not
   elected expressly for the purpose, nor invested with the authority of
   forming a constitution; and as they could not, consistently with the
   American idea of rights, assume such a power, they could only confer upon
   the matter, and put it into a train of operation. The conferees,
   therefore, did no more than state the case, and recommend to the several
   counties to elect six representatives for each county, to meet in
   convention at Philadelphia, with powers to form a constitution, and
   propose it for public consideration.

   This convention, of which Benjamin Franklin was president, having met and
   deliberated, and agreed upon a constitution, they next ordered it to be
   published, not as a thing established, but for the consideration of the
   whole people, their approbation or rejection, and then adjourned to a
   stated time. When the time of adjournment was expired, the convention
   re-assembled; and as the general opinion of the people in approbation of
   it was then known, the constitution was signed, sealed, and proclaimed on
   the authority of the people and the original instrument deposited as a
   public record. The convention then appointed a day for the general
   election of the representatives who were to compose the government, and
   the time it should commence; and having done this they dissolved, and
   returned to their several homes and occupations.

   In this constitution were laid down, first, a declaration of rights; then
   followed the form which the government should have, and the powers it
   should possess- the authority of the courts of judicature, and of juries-
   the manner in which elections should be conducted, and the proportion of
   representatives to the number of electors- the time which each succeeding
   assembly should continue, which was one year- the mode of levying, and of
   accounting for the expenditure, of public money- of appointing public
   officers, etc., etc., etc.

   No article of this constitution could be altered or infringed at the
   discretion of the government that was to ensue. It was to that government
   a law. But as it would have been unwise to preclude the benefit of
   experience, and in order also to prevent the accumulation of errors, if
   any should be found, and to preserve an unison of government with the
   circumstances of the state at all times, the constitution provided that,
   at the expiration of every seven years, a convention should be elected,
   for the express purpose of revising the constitution, and making
   alterations, additions, or abolitions therein, if any such should be found
   necessary.

   Here we see a regular process- a government issuing out of a constitution,
   formed by the people in their original character; and that constitution
   serving, not only as an authority, but as a law of control to the
   government. It was the political bible of the state. Scarcely a family was
   without it. Every member of the government had a copy; and nothing was
   more common, when any debate arose on the principle of a bill, or on the
   extent of any species of authority, than for the members to take the
   printed constitution out of their pocket, and read the chapter with which
   such matter in debate was connected.

   Having thus given an instance from one of the states, I will show the
   proceedings by which the federal constitution of the United States arose
   and was formed.

   Congress, at its two first meetings, in September 1774, and May 1775, was
   nothing more than a deputation from the legislatures of the several
   provinces, afterwards states; and had no other authority than what arose
   from common consent, and the necessity of its acting as a public body. In
   everything which related to the internal affairs of America, congress went
   no further than to issue recommendations to the several provincial
   assemblies, who at discretion adopted them or not. Nothing on the part of
   congress was compulsive; yet, in this situation, it was more faithfully
   and affectionately obeyed than was any government in Europe. This
   instance, like that of the national assembly in France, sufficiently
   shows, that the strength of government does not consist in any thing
   itself, but in the attachment of a nation, and the interest which a people
   feel in supporting it. When this is lost, government is but a child in
   power; and though, like the old government in France, it may harass
   individuals for a while, it but facilitates its own fall.

   After the declaration of independence, it became consistent with the
   principle on which representative government is founded, that the
   authority of congress should be defined and established. Whether that
   authority should be more or less than congress then discretionarily
   exercised was not the question. It was merely the rectitude of the
   measure.

   For this purpose, the act, called the act of confederation (which was a
   sort of imperfect federal constitution), was proposed, and, after long
   deliberation, was concluded in the year 1781. It was not the act of
   congress, because it is repugnant to the principles of representative
   government that a body should give power to itself. Congress first
   informed the several states, of the powers which it conceived were
   necessary to be invested in the union, to enable it to perform the duties
   and services required from it; and the states severally agreed with each
   other, and concentrated in congress those powers.

   It may not be improper to observe that in both those instances (the one of
   Pennsylvania, and the other of the United States), there is no such thing
   as the idea of a compact between the people on one side, and the
   government on the other. The compact was that of the people with each
   other, to produce and constitute a government. To suppose that any
   government can be a party in a compact with the whole people, is to
   suppose it to have existence before it can have a right to exist. The only
   instance in which a compact can take place between the people and those
   who exercise the government, is, that the people shall pay them, while
   they choose to employ them.

   Government is not a trade which any man, or any body of men, has a right
   to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust,
   in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is
   always resumeable. It has of itself no rights; they are altogether duties.

   Having thus given two instances of the original formation of a
   constitution, I will show the manner in which both have been changed since
   their first establishment.

   The powers vested in the governments of the several states, by the state
   constitutions, were found, upon experience, to be too great; and those
   vested in the federal government, by the act of confederation, too little.
   The defect was not in the principle, but in the distribution of power.

   Numerous publications, in pamphlets and in the newspapers, appeared, on
   the propriety and necessity of new modelling the federal government. After
   some time of public discussion, carried on through the channel of the
   press, and in conversations, the state of Virginia, experiencing some
   inconvenience with respect to commerce, proposed holding a continental
   conference; in consequence of which, a deputation from five or six state
   assemblies met at Annapolis, in Maryland, in 1786. This meeting, not
   conceiving itself sufficiently authorised to go into the business of a
   reform, did no more than state their general opinions of the propriety of
   the measure, and recommend that a convention of all the states should be
   held the year following.

   The convention met at Philadelphia in May, 1787, of which General
   Washington was elected president. He was not at that time connected with
   any of the state governments, or with congress. He delivered up his
   commission when the war ended, and since then had lived a private citizen.

   The convention went deeply into all the subjects; and having, after a
   variety of debate and investigation, agreed among themselves upon the
   several parts of a federal constitution, the next question was, the manner
   of giving it authority and practice.

   For this purpose they did not, like a cabal of courtiers, send for a Dutch
   Stadtholder, or a German Elector; but they referred the whole matter to
   the sense and interest of the country.

   They first directed that the proposed constitution should be published.
   Secondly, that each state should elect a convention, expressly for the
   purpose of taking it into consideration, and of ratifying or rejecting it;
   and that as soon as the approbation and ratification of any nine states
   should be given, that those states shall proceed to the election of their
   proportion of members to the new federal government; and that the
   operation of it should then begin, and the former federal government
   cease.

   The several states proceeded accordingly to elect their conventions. Some
   of those conventions ratified the constitution by very large majorities,
   and two or three unanimously. In others there were much debate and
   division of opinion. In the Massachusetts convention, which met at Boston,
   the majority was not above nineteen or twenty, in about three hundred
   members; but such is the nature of representative government, that it
   quietly decides all matters by majority. After the debate in the
   Massachusetts convention was closed, and the vote taken, the objecting
   members rose and declared, "That though they had argued and voted against
   it, because certain parts appeared to them in a different light to what
   they appeared to other members; yet, as the vote had decided in favour of
   the constitution as proposed, they should give it the same practical
   support as if they had for it."

   As soon as nine states had concurred (and the rest followed in the order
   their conventions were elected), the old fabric of the federal government
   was taken down, and the new one erected, of which General Washington is
   president.- In this place I cannot help remarking, that the character and
   services of this gentleman are sufficient to put all those men called
   kings to shame. While they are receiving from the sweat and labours of
   mankind, a prodigality of pay, to which neither their abilities nor their
   services can entitle them, he is rendering every service in his power, and
   refusing every pecuniary reward. He accepted no pay as commander-in-chief;
   he accepts none as president of the United States.

   After the new federal constitution was established, the state of
   Pennsylvania, conceiving that some parts of its own constitution required
   to be altered, elected a convention for that purpose. The proposed
   alterations were published, and the people concurring therein, they were
   established.

   In forming those constitutions, or in altering them, little or no
   inconvenience took place. The ordinary course of things was not
   interrupted, and the advantages have been much. It is always the interest
   of a far greater number of people in a nation to have things right, than
   to let them remain wrong; and when public matters are open to debate, and
   the public judgment free, it will not decide wrong, unless it decides too
   hastily.

   In the two instances of changing the constitutions, the governments then
   in being were not actors either way. Government has no right to make
   itself a party in any debate respecting the principles or modes of
   forming, or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those
   who exercise the powers of government that constitutions, and the
   governments issuing from them, are established. In all those matters the
   right of judging and acting are in those who pay, and not in those who
   receive.

   A constitution is the property of a nation, and not of those who exercise
   the government. All the constitutions of America are declared to be
   established on the authority of the people. In France, the word nation is
   used instead of the people; but in both cases, a constitution is a thing
   antecedent to the government, and always distinct there from.

   In England it is not difficult to perceive that everything has a
   constitution, except the nation. Every society and association that is
   established, first agreed upon a number of original articles, digested
   into form, which are its constitution. It then appointed its officers,
   whose powers and authorities are described in that constitution, and the
   government of that society then commenced. Those officers, by whatever
   name they are called, have no authority to add to, alter, or abridge the
   original articles. It is only to the constituting power that this right
   belongs.

   From the want of understanding the difference between a constitution and a
   government, Dr. Johnson, and all writers of his description, have always
   bewildered themselves. They could not but perceive, that there must
   necessarily be a controlling power existing somewhere, and they placed
   this power in the discretion of the persons exercising the government,
   instead of placing it in a constitution formed by the nation. When it is
   in a constitution, it has the nation for its support, and the natural and
   the political controlling powers are together. The laws which are enacted
   by governments, control men only as individuals, but the nation, through
   its constitution, controls the whole government, and has a natural ability
   to do so. The final controlling power, therefore, and the original
   constituting power, are one and the same power.

   Dr. Johnson could not have advanced such a position in any country where
   there was a constitution; and he is himself an evidence that no such thing
   as a constitution exists in England. But it may be put as a question, not
   improper to be investigated, that if a constitution does not exist, how
   came the idea of its existence so generally established?

   In order to decide this question, it is necessary to consider a
   constitution in both its cases:- First, as creating a government and
   giving it powers. Secondly, as regulating and restraining the powers so
   given.

   If we begin with William of Normandy, we find that the government of
   England was originally a tyranny, founded on an invasion and conquest of
   the country. This being admitted, it will then appear, that the exertion
   of the nation, at different periods, to abate that tyranny, and render it
   less intolerable, has been credited for a constitution.

   Magna Charta, as it was called (it is now like an almanack of the same
   date), was no more than compelling the government to renounce a part of
   its assumptions. It did not create and give powers to government in a
   manner a constitution does; but was, as far as it went, of the nature of a
   re-conquest, and not a constitution; for could the nation have totally
   expelled the usurpation, as France has done its despotism, it would then
   have had a constitution to form.

   The history of the Edwards and the Henries, and up to the commencement of
   the Stuarts, exhibits as many instances of tyranny as could be acted
   within the limits to which the nation had restricted it. The Stuarts
   endeavoured to pass those limits, and their fate is well known. In all
   those instances we see nothing of a constitution, but only of restrictions
   on assumed power.

   After this, another William, descended from the same stock, and claiming
   from the same origin, gained possession; and of the two evils, James and
   William, the nation preferred what it thought the least; since, from
   circumstances, it must take one. The act, called the Bill of Rights, comes
   here into view. What is it, but a bargain, which the parts of the
   government made with each other to divide powers, profits, and privileges?
   You shall have so much, and I will have the rest; and with respect to the
   nation, it said, for your share, YOU shall have the right of petitioning.
   This being the case, the bill of rights is more properly a bill of wrongs,
   and of insult. As to what is called the convention parliament, it was a
   thing that made itself, and then made the authority by which it acted. A
   few persons got together, and called themselves by that name. Several of
   them had never been elected, and none of them for the purpose.

   From the time of William a species of government arose, issuing out of
   this coalition bill of rights; and more so, since the corruption
   introduced at the Hanover succession by the agency of Walpole; that can be
   described by no other name than a despotic legislation. Though the parts
   may embarrass each other, the whole has no bounds; and the only right it
   acknowledges out of itself, is the right of petitioning. Where then is the
   constitution either that gives or restrains power?

   It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less
   a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a
   parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated
   from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

   I cannot believe that any nation, reasoning on its own rights, would have
   thought of calling these things a constitution, if the cry of constitution
   had not been set up by the government. It has got into circulation like
   the words bore and quoz [quiz], by being chalked up in the speeches of
   parliament, as those words were on window shutters and doorposts; but
   whatever the constitution may be in other respects, it has undoubtedly
   been the most productive machine of taxation that was ever invented. The
   taxes in France, under the new constitution, are not quite thirteen
   shillings per head,*[18] and the taxes in England, under what is called
   its present constitution, are forty-eight shillings and sixpence per head-
   men, women, and children- amounting to nearly seventeen millions sterling,
   besides the expense of collecting, which is upwards of a million more.

   In a country like England, where the whole of the civil Government is
   executed by the people of every town and county, by means of parish
   officers, magistrates, quarterly sessions, juries, and assize; without any
   trouble to what is called the government or any other expense to the
   revenue than the salary of the judges, it is astonishing how such a mass
   of taxes can be employed. Not even the internal defence of the country is
   paid out of the revenue. On all occasions, whether real or contrived,
   recourse is continually had to new loans and new taxes. No wonder, then,
   that a machine of government so advantageous to the advocates of a court,
   should be so triumphantly extolled! No wonder, that St. James's or St.
   Stephen's should echo with the continual cry of constitution; no wonder,
   that the French revolution should be reprobated, and the res-publica
   treated with reproach! The red book of England, like the red book of
   France, will explain the reason.*[19]

   I will now, by way of relaxation, turn a thought or two to Mr. Burke. I
   ask his pardon for neglecting him so long.

   "America," says he (in his speech on the Canada Constitution bill), "never
   dreamed of such absurd doctrine as the Rights of Man."

   Mr. Burke is such a bold presumer, and advances his assertions and his
   premises with such a deficiency of judgment, that, without troubling
   ourselves about principles of philosophy or politics, the mere logical
   conclusions they produce, are ridiculous. For instance,

   If governments, as Mr. Burke asserts, are not founded on the Rights of
   MAN, and are founded on any rights at all, they consequently must be
   founded on the right of something that is not man. What then is that
   something?

   Generally speaking, we know of no other creatures that inhabit the earth
   than man and beast; and in all cases, where only two things offer
   themselves, and one must be admitted, a negation proved on any one,
   amounts to an affirmative on the other; and therefore, Mr. Burke, by
   proving against the Rights of Man, proves in behalf of the beast; and
   consequently, proves that government is a beast; and as difficult things
   sometimes explain each other, we now see the origin of keeping wild beasts
   in the Tower; for they certainly can be of no other use than to show the
   origin of the government. They are in the place of a constitution. O John
   Bull, what honours thou hast lost by not being a wild beast. Thou
   mightest, on Mr. Burke's system, have been in the Tower for life.

   If Mr. Burke's arguments have not weight enough to keep one serious, the
   fault is less mine than his; and as I am willing to make an apology to the
   reader for the liberty I have taken, I hope Mr. Burke will also make his
   for giving the cause.

   Having thus paid Mr. Burke the compliment of remembering him, I return to
   the subject.

   From the want of a constitution in England to restrain and regulate the
   wild impulse of power, many of the laws are irrational and tyrannical, and
   the administration of them vague and problematical.

   The attention of the government of England (for I rather choose to call it
   by this name than the English government) appears, since its political
   connection with Germany, to have been so completely engrossed and absorbed
   by foreign affairs, and the means of raising taxes, that it seems to exist
   for no other purposes. Domestic concerns are neglected; and with respect
   to regular law, there is scarcely such a thing.

   Almost every case must now be determined by some precedent, be that
   precedent good or bad, or whether it properly applies or not; and the
   practice is become so general as to suggest a suspicion, that it proceeds
   from a deeper policy than at first sight appears.

   Since the revolution of America, and more so since that of France, this
   preaching up the doctrines of precedents, drawn from times and
   circumstances antecedent to those events, has been the studied practice of
   the English government. The generality of those precedents are founded on
   principles and opinions, the reverse of what they ought; and the greater
   distance of time they are drawn from, the more they are to be suspected.
   But by associating those precedents with a superstitious reverence for
   ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy, the generality of
   mankind are deceived into the design. Governments now act as if they were
   afraid to awaken a single reflection in man. They are softly leading him
   to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention
   from the scene of revolutions. They feel that he is arriving at knowledge
   faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of
   their fears. This political popery, like the ecclesiastical popery of old,
   has had its day, and is hastening to its exit. The ragged relic and the
   antiquated precedent, the monk and the monarch, will moulder together.

   Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the
   precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up. In numerous
   instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an
   example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of
   this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution
   and for law.

   Either the doctrine of precedents is policy to keep a man in a state of
   ignorance, or it is a practical confession that wisdom degenerates in
   governments as governments increase in age, and can only hobble along by
   the stilts and crutches of precedents. How is it that the same persons who
   would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at the same
   time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom? How strangely is antiquity
   treated! To some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and
   ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.

   If the doctrine of precedents is to be followed, the expenses of
   government need not continue the same. Why pay men extravagantly, who have
   but little to do? If everything that can happen is already in precedent,
   legislation is at an end, and precedent, like a dictionary, determines
   every case. Either, therefore, government has arrived at its dotage, and
   requires to be renovated, or all the occasions for exercising its wisdom
   have occurred.

   We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious
   phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the other- the
   one forward and the other backward. If governments are to go on by
   precedent, while nations go on by improvement, they must at last come to a
   final separation; and the sooner, and the more civilly they determine this
   point, the better.*[20]

   Having thus spoken of constitutions generally, as things distinct from
   actual governments, let us proceed to consider the parts of which a
   constitution is composed.

   Opinions differ more on this subject than with respect to the whole. That
   a nation ought to have a constitution, as a rule for the conduct of its
   government, is a simple question in which all men, not directly courtiers,
   will agree. It is only on the component parts that questions and opinions
   multiply.

   But this difficulty, like every other, will diminish when put into a train
   of being rightly understood.

   The first thing is, that a nation has a right to establish a constitution.

   Whether it exercises this right in the most judicious manner at first is
   quite another case. It exercises it agreeably to the judgment it
   possesses; and by continuing to do so, all errors will at last be
   exploded.

   When this right is established in a nation, there is no fear that it will
   be employed to its own injury. A nation can have no interest in being
   wrong.

   Though all the constitutions of America are on one general principle, yet
   no two of them are exactly alike in their component parts, or in the
   distribution of the powers which they give to the actual governments. Some
   are more, and others less complex.

   In forming a constitution, it is first necessary to consider what are the
   ends for which government is necessary? Secondly, what are the best means,
   and the least expensive, for accomplishing those ends?

   Government is nothing more than a national association; and the object of
   this association is the good of all, as well individually as collectively.
   Every man wishes to pursue his occupation, and to enjoy the fruits of his
   labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety, and with the
   least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the
   objects for which government ought to be established are answered.

   It has been customary to consider government under three distinct general
   heads. The legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

   But if we permit our judgment to act unincumbered by the habit of
   multiplied terms, we can perceive no more than two divisions of power, of
   which civil government is composed, namely, that of legislating or
   enacting laws, and that of executing or administering them. Everything,
   therefore, appertaining to civil government, classes itself under one or
   other of these two divisions.

   So far as regards the execution of the laws, that which is called the
   judicial power, is strictly and properly the executive power of every
   country. It is that power to which every individual has appeal, and which
   causes the laws to be executed; neither have we any other clear idea with
   respect to the official execution of the laws. In England, and also in
   America and France, this power begins with the magistrate, and proceeds up
   through all the courts of judicature.

   I leave to courtiers to explain what is meant by calling monarchy the
   executive power. It is merely a name in which acts of government are done;
   and any other, or none at all, would answer the same purpose. Laws have
   neither more nor less authority on this account. It must be from the
   justness of their principles, and the interest which a nation feels
   therein, that they derive support; if they require any other than this, it
   is a sign that something in the system of government is imperfect. Laws
   difficult to be executed cannot be generally good.

   With respect to the organization of the legislative power, different modes
   have been adopted in different countries. In America it is generally
   composed of two houses. In France it consists but of one, but in both
   countries, it is wholly by representation.

   The case is, that mankind (from the long tyranny of assumed power) have
   had so few opportunities of making the necessary trials on modes and
   principles of government, in order to discover the best, that government
   is but now beginning to be known, and experience is yet wanting to
   determine many particulars.

   The objections against two houses are, first, that there is an
   inconsistency in any part of a whole legislature, coming to a final
   determination by vote on any matter, whilst that matter, with respect to
   that whole, is yet only in a train of deliberation, and consequently open
   to new illustrations.

   Secondly, That by taking the vote on each, as a separate body, it always
   admits of the possibility, and is often the case in practice, that the
   minority governs the majority, and that, in some instances, to a degree of
   great inconsistency.

   Thirdly, That two houses arbitrarily checking or controlling each other is
   inconsistent; because it cannot be proved on the principles of just
   representation, that either should be wiser or better than the other. They
   may check in the wrong as well as in the right- therefore to give the
   power where we cannot give the wisdom to use it, nor be assured of its
   being rightly used, renders the hazard at least equal to the
   precaution.*[21]

   The objection against a single house is, that it is always in a condition
   of committing itself too soon.- But it should at the same time be
   remembered, that when there is a constitution which defines the power, and
   establishes the principles within which a legislature shall act, there is
   already a more effectual check provided, and more powerfully operating,
   than any other check can be. For example,

   Were a Bill to be brought into any of the American legislatures similar to
   that which was passed into an act by the English parliament, at the
   commencement of George the First, to extend the duration of the assemblies
   to a longer period than they now sit, the check is in the constitution,
   which in effect says, Thus far shalt thou go and no further.

   But in order to remove the objection against a single house (that of
   acting with too quick an impulse), and at the same time to avoid the
   inconsistencies, in some cases absurdities, arising from two houses, the
   following method has been proposed as an improvement upon both.

   First, To have but one representation.

   Secondly, To divide that representation, by lot, into two or three parts.

   Thirdly, That every proposed bill shall be first debated in those parts by
   succession, that they may become the hearers of each other, but without
   taking any vote. After which the whole representation to assemble for a
   general debate and determination by vote.

   To this proposed improvement has been added another, for the purpose of
   keeping the representation in the state of constant renovation; which is,
   that one-third of the representation of each county, shall go out at the
   expiration of one year, and the number be replaced by new elections.
   Another third at the expiration of the second year replaced in like
   manner, and every third year to be a general election.*[22]

   But in whatever manner the separate parts of a constitution may be
   arranged, there is one general principle that distinguishes freedom from
   slavery, which is, that all hereditary government over a people is to them
   a species of slavery, and representative government is freedom.

   Considering government in the only light in which it should be considered,
   that of a National Association, it ought to be so constructed as not to be
   disordered by any accident happening among the parts; and, therefore, no
   extraordinary power, capable of producing such an effect, should be lodged
   in the hands of any individual. The death, sickness, absence or defection,
   of any one individual in a government, ought to be a matter of no more
   consequence, with respect to the nation, than if the same circumstance had
   taken place in a member of the English Parliament, or the French National
   Assembly.

   Scarcely anything presents a more degrading character of national
   greatness, than its being thrown into confusion, by anything happening to
   or acted by any individual; and the ridiculousness of the scene is often
   increased by the natural insignificance of the person by whom it is
   occasioned. Were a government so constructed, that it could not go on
   unless a goose or a gander were present in the senate, the difficulties
   would be just as great and as real, on the flight or sickness of the
   goose, or the gander, as if it were called a King. We laugh at individuals
   for the silly difficulties they make to themselves, without perceiving
   that the greatest of all ridiculous things are acted in governments.*[23]

   All the constitutions of America are on a plan that excludes the childish
   embarrassments which occur in monarchical countries. No suspension of
   government can there take place for a moment, from any circumstances
   whatever. The system of representation provides for everything, and is the
   only system in which nations and governments can always appear in their
   proper character.

   As extraordinary power ought not to be lodged in the hands of any
   individual, so ought there to be no appropriations of public money to any
   person, beyond what his services in a state may be worth. It signifies not
   whether a man be called a president, a king, an emperor, a senator, or by
   any other name which propriety or folly may devise or arrogance assume; it
   is only a certain service he can perform in the state; and the service of
   any such individual in the routine of office, whether such office be
   called monarchical, presidential, senatorial, or by any other name or
   title, can never exceed the value of ten thousand pounds a year. All the
   great services that are done in the world are performed by volunteer
   characters, who accept nothing for them; but the routine of office is
   always regulated to such a general standard of abilities as to be within
   the compass of numbers in every country to perform, and therefore cannot
   merit very extraordinary recompense. Government, says Swift, is a Plain
   thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads.

   It is inhuman to talk of a million sterling a year, paid out of the public
   taxes of any country, for the support of any individual, whilst thousands
   who are forced to contribute thereto, are pining with want, and struggling
   with misery. Government does not consist in a contrast between prisons and
   palaces, between poverty and pomp; it is not instituted to rob the needy
   of his mite, and increase the wretchedness of the wretched.- But on this
   part of the subject I shall speak hereafter, and confine myself at present
   to political observations.

   When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any
   individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind
   of corruption generates and forms. Give to any man a million a year, and
   add thereto the power of creating and disposing of places, at the expense
   of a country, and the liberties of that country are no longer secure. What
   is called the splendour of a throne is no other than the corruption of the
   state. It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious
   indolence, out of the public taxes.

   When once such a vicious system is established it becomes the guard and
   protection of all inferior abuses. The man who is in the receipt of a
   million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in
   the event, it should reach to himself. It is always his interest to defend
   inferior abuses, as so many outworks to protect the citadel; and on this
   species of political fortification, all the parts have such a common
   dependence that it is never to be expected they will attack each
   other.*[24]

   Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world, had it not
   been for the abuses it protects. It is the master-fraud, which shelters
   all others. By admitting a participation of the spoil, it makes itself
   friends; and when it ceases to do this it will cease to be the idol of
   courtiers.

   As the principle on which constitutions are now formed rejects all
   hereditary pretensions to government, it also rejects all that catalogue
   of assumptions known by the name of prerogatives.

   If there is any government where prerogatives might with apparent safety
   be entrusted to any individual, it is in the federal government of
   America. The president of the United States of America is elected only for
   four years. He is not only responsible in the general sense of the word,
   but a particular mode is laid down in the constitution for trying him. He
   cannot be elected under thirty-five years of age; and he must be a native
   of the country.

   In a comparison of these cases with the Government of England, the
   difference when applied to the latter amounts to an absurdity. In England
   the person who exercises prerogative is often a foreigner; always half a
   foreigner, and always married to a foreigner. He is never in full natural
   or political connection with the country, is not responsible for anything,
   and becomes of age at eighteen years; yet such a person is permitted to
   form foreign alliances, without even the knowledge of the nation, and to
   make war and peace without its consent.

   But this is not all. Though such a person cannot dispose of the government
   in the manner of a testator, he dictates the marriage connections, which,
   in effect, accomplish a great part of the same end. He cannot directly
   bequeath half the government to Prussia, but he can form a marriage
   partnership that will produce almost the same thing. Under such
   circumstances, it is happy for England that she is not situated on the
   Continent, or she might, like Holland, fall under the dictatorship of
   Prussia. Holland, by marriage, is as effectually governed by Prussia, as
   if the old tyranny of bequeathing the government had been the means.

   The presidency in America (or, as it is sometimes called, the executive)
   is the only office from which a foreigner is excluded, and in England it
   is the only one to which he is admitted. A foreigner cannot be a member of
   Parliament, but he may be what is called a king. If there is any reason
   for excluding foreigners, it ought to be from those offices where mischief
   can most be acted, and where, by uniting every bias of interest and
   attachment, the trust is best secured. But as nations proceed in the great
   business of forming constitutions, they will examine with more precision
   into the nature and business of that department which is called the
   executive. What the legislative and judicial departments are every one can
   see; but with respect to what, in Europe, is called the executive, as
   distinct from those two, it is either a political superfluity or a chaos
   of unknown things.

   Some kind of official department, to which reports shall be made from the
   different parts of a nation, or from abroad, to be laid before the
   national representatives, is all that is necessary; but there is no
   consistency in calling this the executive; neither can it be considered in
   any other light than as inferior to the legislative. The sovereign
   authority in any country is the power of making laws, and everything else
   is an official department.

   Next to the arrangement of the principles and the organization of the
   several parts of a constitution, is the provision to be made for the
   support of the persons to whom the nation shall confide the administration
   of the constitutional powers.

   A nation can have no right to the time and services of any person at his
   own expense, whom it may choose to employ or entrust in any department
   whatever; neither can any reason be given for making provision for the
   support of any one part of a government and not for the other.

   But admitting that the honour of being entrusted with any part of a
   government is to be considered a sufficient reward, it ought to be so to
   every person alike. If the members of the legislature of any country are
   to serve at their own expense that which is called the executive, whether
   monarchical or by any other name, ought to serve in like manner. It is
   inconsistent to pay the one, and accept the service of the other gratis.

   In America, every department in the government is decently provided for;
   but no one is extravagantly paid. Every member of Congress, and of the
   Assemblies, is allowed a sufficiency for his expenses. Whereas in England,
   a most prodigal provision is made for the support of one part of the
   Government, and none for the other, the consequence of which is that the
   one is furnished with the means of corruption and the other is put into
   the condition of being corrupted. Less than a fourth part of such expense,
   applied as it is in America, would remedy a great part of the corruption.

   Another reform in the American constitution is the exploding all oaths of
   personality. The oath of allegiance in America is to the nation only. The
   putting any individual as a figure for a nation is improper. The happiness
   of a nation is the superior object, and therefore the intention of an oath
   of allegiance ought not to be obscured by being figuratively taken, to, or
   in the name of, any person. The oath, called the civic oath, in France,
   viz., "the nation, the law, and the king," is improper. If taken at all,
   it ought to be as in America, to the nation only. The law may or may not
   be good; but, in this place, it can have no other meaning, than as being
   conducive to the happiness of a nation, and therefore is included in it.
   The remainder of the oath is improper, on the ground, that all personal
   oaths ought to be abolished. They are the remains of tyranny on one part
   and slavery on the other; and the name of the Creator ought not to be
   introduced to witness the degradation of his creation; or if taken, as is
   already mentioned, as figurative of the nation, it is in this place
   redundant. But whatever apology may be made for oaths at the first
   establishment of a government, they ought not to be permitted afterwards.
   If a government requires the support of oaths, it is a sign that it is not
   worth supporting, and ought not to be supported. Make government what it
   ought to be, and it will support itself.

   To conclude this part of the subject:- One of the greatest improvements
   that have been made for the perpetual security and progress of
   constitutional liberty, is the provision which the new constitutions make
   for occasionally revising, altering, and amending them.

   The principle upon which Mr. Burke formed his political creed, that of
   "binding and controlling posterity to the end of time, and of renouncing
   and abdicating the rights of all posterity, for ever," is now become too
   detestable to be made a subject of debate; and therefore, I pass it over
   with no other notice than exposing it.

   Government is but now beginning to be known. Hitherto it has been the mere
   exercise of power, which forbade all effectual enquiry into rights, and
   grounded itself wholly on possession. While the enemy of liberty was its
   judge, the progress of its principles must have been small indeed.

   The constitutions of America, and also that of France, have either affixed
   a period for their revision, or laid down the mode by which improvement
   shall be made. It is perhaps impossible to establish anything that
   combines principles with opinions and practice, which the progress of
   circumstances, through a length of years, will not in some measure
   derange, or render inconsistent; and, therefore, to prevent inconveniences
   accumulating, till they discourage reformations or provoke revolutions, it
   is best to provide the means of regulating them as they occur. The Rights
   of Man are the rights of all generations of men, and cannot be monopolised
   by any. That which is worth following, will be followed for the sake of
   its worth, and it is in this that its security lies, and not in any
   conditions with which it may be encumbered. When a man leaves property to
   his heirs, he does not connect it with an obligation that they shall
   accept it. Why, then, should we do otherwise with respect to
   constitutions? The best constitution that could now be devised, consistent
   with the condition of the present moment, may be far short of that
   excellence which a few years may afford. There is a morning of reason
   rising upon man on the subject of government, that has not appeared
   before. As the barbarism of the present old governments expires, the moral
   conditions of nations with respect to each other will be changed. Man will
   not be brought up with the savage idea of considering his species as his
   enemy, because the accident of birth gave the individuals existence in
   countries distinguished by different names; and as constitutions have
   always some relation to external as well as to domestic circumstances, the
   means of benefitting by every change, foreign or domestic, should be a
   part of every constitution. We already see an alteration in the national
   disposition of England and France towards each other, which, when we look
   back to only a few years, is itself a Revolution. Who could have foreseen,
   or who could have believed, that a French National Assembly would ever
   have been a popular toast in England, or that a friendly alliance of the
   two nations should become the wish of either? It shows that man, were he
   not corrupted by governments, is naturally the friend of man, and that
   human nature is not of itself vicious. That spirit of jealousy and
   ferocity, which the governments of the two countries inspired, and which
   they rendered subservient to the purpose of taxation, is now yielding to
   the dictates of reason, interest, and humanity. The trade of courts is
   beginning to be understood, and the affectation of mystery, with all the
   artificial sorcery by which they imposed upon mankind, is on the decline.
   It has received its death-wound; and though it may linger, it will expire.
   Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which
   appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolised from age to
   age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other
   proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes
   with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have
   precipitated the world? Just emerging from such a barbarous condition, it
   is too soon to determine to what extent of improvement government may yet
   be carried. For what we can foresee, all Europe may form but one great
   Republic, and man be free of the whole.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   CHAPTER V

   Ways And Means Of Improving The Condition Of Europe Interspersed With
   Miscellaneous Observations

   In contemplating a subject that embraces with equatorial magnitude the
   whole region of humanity it is impossible to confine the pursuit in one
   single direction. It takes ground on every character and condition that
   appertains to man, and blends the individual, the nation, and the world.
   From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be
   extinguished. Without consuming, like the Ultima Ratio Regum, it winds its
   progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man
   finds himself changed, he scarcely perceives how. He acquires a knowledge
   of his rights by attending justly to his interest, and discovers in the
   event that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear
   of resisting it, and that, in order "to be free, it is sufficient that he
   wills it."

   Having in all the preceding parts of this work endeavoured to establish a
   system of principles as a basis on which governments ought to be erected,
   I shall proceed in this, to the ways and means of rendering them into
   practice. But in order to introduce this part of the subject with more
   propriety, and stronger effect, some preliminary observations, deducible
   from, or connected with, those principles, are necessary.

   Whatever the form or constitution of government may be, it ought to have
   no other object than the general happiness. When, instead of this, it
   operates to create and increase wretchedness in any of the parts of
   society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary. Customary
   language has classed the condition of man under the two descriptions of
   civilised and uncivilised life. To the one it has ascribed felicity and
   affluence; to the other hardship and want. But, however our imagination
   may be impressed by painting and comparison, it is nevertheless true, that
   a great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in
   a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian.
   I speak not of one country, but of all. It is so in England, it is so all
   over Europe. Let us enquire into the cause.

   It lies not in any natural defect in the principles of civilisation, but
   in preventing those principles having a universal operation; the
   consequence of which is, a perpetual system of war and expense, that
   drains the country, and defeats the general felicity of which civilisation
   is capable. All the European governments (France now excepted) are
   constructed not on the principle of universal civilisation, but on the
   reverse of it. So far as those governments relate to each other, they are
   in the same condition as we conceive of savage uncivilised life; they put
   themselves beyond the law as well of GOD as of man, and are, with respect
   to principle and reciprocal conduct, like so many individuals in a state
   of nature. The inhabitants of every country, under the civilisation of
   laws, easily civilise together, but governments being yet in an
   uncivilised state, and almost continually at war, they pervert the
   abundance which civilised life produces to carry on the uncivilised part
   to a greater extent. By thus engrafting the barbarism of government upon
   the internal civilisation of a country, it draws from the latter, and more
   especially from the poor, a great portion of those earnings, which should
   be applied to their own subsistence and comfort. Apart from all
   reflections of morality and philosophy, it is a melancholy fact that more
   than one-fourth of the labour of mankind is annually consumed by this
   barbarous system. What has served to continue this evil, is the pecuniary
   advantage which all the governments of Europe have found in keeping up
   this state of uncivilisation. It affords to them pretences for power, and
   revenue, for which there would be neither occasion nor apology, if the
   circle of civilisation were rendered complete. Civil government alone, or
   the government of laws, is not productive of pretences for many taxes; it
   operates at home, directly under the eye of the country, and precludes the
   possibility of much imposition. But when the scene is laid in the
   uncivilised contention of governments, the field of pretences is enlarged,
   and the country, being no longer a judge, is open to every imposition,
   which governments please to act. Not a thirtieth, scarcely a fortieth,
   part of the taxes which are raised in England are either occasioned by, or
   applied to, the purpose of civil government. It is not difficult to see,
   that the whole which the actual government does in this respect, is to
   enact laws, and that the country administers and executes them, at its own
   expense, by means of magistrates, juries, sessions, and assize, over and
   above the taxes which it pays. In this view of the case, we have two
   distinct characters of government; the one the civil government, or the
   government of laws, which operates at home, the other the court or cabinet
   government, which operates abroad, on the rude plan of uncivilised life;
   the one attended with little charge, the other with boundless
   extravagance; and so distinct are the two, that if the latter were to
   sink, as it were, by a sudden opening of the earth, and totally disappear,
   the former would not be deranged. It would still proceed, because it is
   the common interest of the nation that it should, and all the means are in
   practice. Revolutions, then, have for their object a change in the moral
   condition of governments, and with this change the burthen of public taxes
   will lessen, and civilisation will be left to the enjoyment of that
   abundance, of which it is now deprived. In contemplating the whole of this
   subject, I extend my views into the department of commerce. In all my
   publications, where the matter would admit, I have been an advocate for
   commerce, because I am a friend to its effects. It is a pacific system,
   operating to cordialise mankind, by rendering nations, as well as
   individuals, useful to each other. As to the mere theoretical reformation,
   I have never preached it up. The most effectual process is that of
   improving the condition of man by means of his interest; and it is on this
   ground that I take my stand. If commerce were permitted to act to the
   universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and
   produce a revolution in the uncivilised state of governments. The
   invention of commerce has arisen since those governments began, and is the
   greatest approach towards universal civilisation that has yet been made by
   any means not immediately flowing from moral principles. Whatever has a
   tendency to promote the civil intercourse of nations by an exchange of
   benefits, is a subject as worthy of philosophy as of politics. Commerce is
   no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of
   numbers; and by the same rule that nature intended for the intercourse of
   two, she intended that of all. For this purpose she has distributed the
   materials of manufactures and commerce, in various and distant parts of a
   nation and of the world; and as they cannot be procured by war so cheaply
   or so commodiously as by commerce, she has rendered the latter the means
   of extirpating the former. As the two are nearly the opposite of each
   other, consequently, the uncivilised state of the European governments is
   injurious to commerce. Every kind of destruction or embarrassment serves
   to lessen the quantity, and it matters but little in what part of the
   commercial world the reduction begins. Like blood, it cannot be taken from
   any of the parts, without being taken from the whole mass in circulation,
   and all partake of the loss. When the ability in any nation to buy is
   destroyed, it equally involves the seller. Could the government of England
   destroy the commerce of all other nations, she would most effectually ruin
   her own. It is possible that a nation may be the carrier for the world,
   but she cannot be the merchant. She cannot be the seller and buyer of her
   own merchandise. The ability to buy must reside out of herself; and,
   therefore, the prosperity of any commercial nation is regulated by the
   prosperity of the rest. If they are poor she cannot be rich, and her
   condition, be what it may, is an index of the height of the commercial
   tide in other nations. That the principles of commerce, and its universal
   operation may be understood, without understanding the practice, is a
   position that reason will not deny; and it is on this ground only that I
   argue the subject. It is one thing in the counting-house, in the world it
   is another. With respect to its operation it must necessarily be
   contemplated as a reciprocal thing; that only one-half its powers resides
   within the nation, and that the whole is as effectually destroyed by the
   destroying the half that resides without, as if the destruction had been
   committed on that which is within; for neither can act without the other.
   When in the last, as well as in former wars, the commerce of England sunk,
   it was because the quantity was lessened everywhere; and it now rises,
   because commerce is in a rising state in every nation. If England, at this
   day, imports and exports more than at any former period, the nations with
   which she trades must necessarily do the same; her imports are their
   exports, and vice versa. There can be no such thing as a nation
   flourishing alone in commerce: she can only participate; and the
   destruction of it in any part must necessarily affect all. When,
   therefore, governments are at war, the attack is made upon a common stock
   of commerce, and the consequence is the same as if each had attacked his
   own. The present increase of commerce is not to be attributed to
   ministers, or to any political contrivances, but to its own natural
   operation in consequence of peace. The regular markets had been destroyed,
   the channels of trade broken up, the high road of the seas infested with
   robbers of every nation, and the attention of the world called to other
   objects. Those interruptions have ceased, and peace has restored the
   deranged condition of things to their proper order.*[25] It is worth
   remarking that every nation reckons the balance of trade in its own
   favour; and therefore something must be irregular in the common ideas upon
   this subject. The fact, however, is true, according to what is called a
   balance; and it is from this cause that commerce is universally supported.
   Every nation feels the advantage, or it would abandon the practice: but
   the deception lies in the mode of making up the accounts, and in
   attributing what are called profits to a wrong cause. Mr. Pitt has
   sometimes amused himself, by showing what he called a balance of trade
   from the custom-house books. This mode of calculating not only affords no
   rule that is true, but one that is false. In the first place, Every cargo
   that departs from the custom-house appears on the books as an export; and,
   according to the custom-house balance, the losses at sea, and by foreign
   failures, are all reckoned on the side of profit because they appear as
   exports.

   Secondly, Because the importation by the smuggling trade does not appear
   on the custom-house books, to arrange against the exports.

   No balance, therefore, as applying to superior advantages, can be drawn
   from these documents; and if we examine the natural operation of commerce,
   the idea is fallacious; and if true, would soon be injurious. The great
   support of commerce consists in the balance being a level of benefits
   among all nations.

   Two merchants of different nations trading together, will both become
   rich, and each makes the balance in his own favour; consequently, they do
   not get rich of each other; and it is the same with respect to the nations
   in which they reside. The case must be, that each nation must get rich out
   of its own means, and increases that riches by something which it procures
   from another in exchange.

   If a merchant in England sends an article of English manufacture abroad
   which costs him a shilling at home, and imports something which sells for
   two, he makes a balance of one shilling in his favour; but this is not
   gained out of the foreign nation or the foreign merchant, for he also does
   the same by the articles he receives, and neither has the advantage upon
   the other. The original value of the two articles in their proper
   countries was but two shillings; but by changing their places, they
   acquire a new idea of value, equal to double what they had first, and that
   increased value is equally divided.

   There is no otherwise a balance on foreign than on domestic commerce. The
   merchants of London and Newcastle trade on the same principles, as if they
   resided in different nations, and make their balances in the same manner:
   yet London does not get rich out of Newcastle, any more than Newcastle out
   of London: but coals, the merchandize of Newcastle, have an additional
   value at London, and London merchandize has the same at Newcastle.

   Though the principle of all commerce is the same, the domestic, in a
   national view, is the part the most beneficial; because the whole of the
   advantages, an both sides, rests within the nation; whereas, in foreign
   commerce, it is only a participation of one-half.

   The most unprofitable of all commerce is that connected with foreign
   dominion. To a few individuals it may be beneficial, merely because it is
   commerce; but to the nation it is a loss. The expense of maintaining
   dominion more than absorbs the profits of any trade. It does not increase
   the general quantity in the world, but operates to lessen it; and as a
   greater mass would be afloat by relinquishing dominion, the participation
   without the expense would be more valuable than a greater quantity with
   it.

   But it is impossible to engross commerce by dominion; and therefore it is
   still more fallacious. It cannot exist in confined channels, and
   necessarily breaks out by regular or irregular means, that defeat the
   attempt: and to succeed would be still worse. France, since the
   Revolution, has been more indifferent as to foreign possessions, and other
   nations will become the same when they investigate the subject with
   respect to commerce.

   To the expense of dominion is to be added that of navies, and when the
   amounts of the two are subtracted from the profits of commerce, it will
   appear, that what is called the balance of trade, even admitting it to
   exist, is not enjoyed by the nation, but absorbed by the Government.

   The idea of having navies for the protection of commerce is delusive. It
   is putting means of destruction for the means of protection. Commerce
   needs no other protection than the reciprocal interest which every nation
   feels in supporting it- it is common stock- it exists by a balance of
   advantages to all; and the only interruption it meets, is from the present
   uncivilised state of governments, and which it is its common interest to
   reform.*[26]

   Quitting this subject, I now proceed to other matters.- As it is necessary
   to include England in the prospect of a general reformation, it is proper
   to inquire into the defects of its government. It is only by each nation
   reforming its own, that the whole can be improved, and the full benefit of
   reformation enjoyed. Only partial advantages can flow from partial
   reforms.

   France and England are the only two countries in Europe where a
   reformation in government could have successfully begun. The one secure by
   the ocean, and the other by the immensity of its internal strength, could
   defy the malignancy of foreign despotism. But it is with revolutions as
   with commerce, the advantages increase by their becoming general, and
   double to either what each would receive alone.

   As a new system is now opening to the view of the world, the European
   courts are plotting to counteract it. Alliances, contrary to all former
   systems, are agitating, and a common interest of courts is forming against
   the common interest of man. This combination draws a line that runs
   throughout Europe, and presents a cause so entirely new as to exclude all
   calculations from former circumstances. While despotism warred with
   despotism, man had no interest in the contest; but in a cause that unites
   the soldier with the citizen, and nation with nation, the despotism of
   courts, though it feels the danger and meditates revenge, is afraid to
   strike.

   No question has arisen within the records of history that pressed with the
   importance of the present. It is not whether this or that party shall be
   in or not, or Whig or Tory, high or low shall prevail; but whether man
   shall inherit his rights, and universal civilisation take place? Whether
   the fruits of his labours shall be enjoyed by himself or consumed by the
   profligacy of governments? Whether robbery shall be banished from courts,
   and wretchedness from countries?

   When, in countries that are called civilised, we see age going to the
   workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system
   of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such
   countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of
   common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other
   chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy. Its entrance into life is
   marked with the presage of its fate; and until this is remedied, it is in
   vain to punish.

   Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such
   provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to
   exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the
   other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon
   kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even
   the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to
   support the fraud that oppresses them.

   Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? The fact is a
   proof, among other things, of a wretchedness in their condition. Bred up
   without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the
   exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity. The millions that are
   superfluously wasted upon governments are more than sufficient to reform
   those evils, and to benefit the condition of every man in a nation, not
   included within the purlieus of a court. This I hope to make appear in the
   progress of this work.

   It is the nature of compassion to associate with misfortune. In taking up
   this subject I seek no recompense- I fear no consequence. Fortified with
   that proud integrity, that disdains to triumph or to yield, I will
   advocate the Rights of Man.

   It is to my advantage that I have served an apprenticeship to life. I know
   the value of moral instruction, and I have seen the danger of the
   contrary.

   At an early period- little more than sixteen years of age, raw and
   adventurous, and heated with the false heroism of a master*[27] who had
   served in a man-of-war- I began the carver of my own fortune, and entered
   on board the Terrible Privateer, Captain Death. From this adventure I was
   happily prevented by the affectionate and moral remonstrance of a good
   father, who, from his own habits of life, being of the Quaker profession,
   must begin to look upon me as lost. But the impression, much as it
   effected at the time, began to wear away, and I entered afterwards in the
   King of Prussia Privateer, Captain Mendez, and went with her to sea. Yet,
   from such a beginning, and with all the inconvenience of early life
   against me, I am proud to say, that with a perseverance undismayed by
   difficulties, a disinterestedness that compelled respect, I have not only
   contributed to raise a new empire in the world, founded on a new system of
   government, but I have arrived at an eminence in political literature, the
   most difficult of all lines to succeed and excel in, which aristocracy
   with all its aids has not been able to reach or to rival.*[28]

   Knowing my own heart and feeling myself as I now do, superior to all the
   skirmish of party, the inveteracy of interested or mistaken opponents, I
   answer not to falsehood or abuse, but proceed to the defects of the
   English Government.

   I begin with charters and corporations.

   It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It
   operates by a contrary effect- that of taking rights away. Rights are
   inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those
   rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a
   few. If charters were constructed so as to express in direct terms, "that
   every inhabitant, who is not a member of a corporation, shall not exercise
   the right of voting," such charters would, in the face, be charters not of
   rights, but of exclusion. The effect is the same under the form they now
   stand; and the only persons on whom they operate are the persons whom they
   exclude. Those whose rights are guaranteed, by not being taken away,
   exercise no other rights than as members of the community they are
   entitled to without a charter; and, therefore, all charters have no other
   than an indirect negative operation. They do not give rights to A, but
   they make a difference in favour of A by taking away the right of B, and
   consequently are instruments of injustice.

   But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what
   relates merely to elections. They are sources of endless contentions in
   the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national
   society. A native of England, under the operation of these charters and
   corporations, cannot be said to be an Englishman in the full sense of the
   word. He is not free of the nation, in the same manner that a Frenchman is
   free of France, and an American of America. His rights are circumscribed
   to the town, and, in some cases, to the parish of his birth; and all other
   parts, though in his native land, are to him as a foreign country. To
   acquire a residence in these, he must undergo a local naturalisation by
   purchase, or he is forbidden or expelled the place. This species of
   feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns;
   and the effect is visible.

   The generality of corporation towns are in a state of solitary decay, and
   prevented from further ruin only by some circumstance in their situation,
   such as a navigable river, or a plentiful surrounding country. As
   population is one of the chief sources of wealth (for without it land
   itself has no value), everything which operates to prevent it must lessen
   the value of property; and as corporations have not only this tendency,
   but directly this effect, they cannot but be injurious. If any policy were
   to be followed, instead of that of general freedom, to every person to
   settle where he chose (as in France or America) it would be more
   consistent to give encouragement to new comers than to preclude their
   admission by exacting premiums from them.*[29]

   The persons most immediately interested in the abolition of corporations
   are the inhabitants of the towns where corporations are established. The
   instances of Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield show, by contrast, the
   injuries which those Gothic institutions are to property and commerce. A
   few examples may be found, such as that of London, whose natural and
   commercial advantage, owing to its situation on the Thames, is capable of
   bearing up against the political evils of a corporation; but in almost all
   other cases the fatality is too visible to be doubted or denied.

   Though the whole nation is not so directly affected by the depression of
   property in corporation towns as the inhabitants themselves, it partakes
   of the consequence. By lessening the value of property, the quantity of
   national commerce is curtailed. Every man is a customer in proportion to
   his ability; and as all parts of a nation trade with each other, whatever
   affects any of the parts must necessarily communicate to the whole.

   As one of the Houses of the English Parliament is, in a great measure,
   made up of elections from these corporations; and as it is unnatural that
   a pure stream should flow from a foul fountain, its vices are but a
   continuation of the vices of its origin. A man of moral honour and good
   political principles cannot submit to the mean drudgery and disgraceful
   arts, by which such elections are carried. To be a successful candidate,
   he must be destitute of the qualities that constitute a just legislator;
   and being thus disciplined to corruption by the mode of entering into
   Parliament, it is not to be expected that the representative should be
   better than the man.

   Mr. Burke, in speaking of the English representation, has advanced as bold
   a challenge as ever was given in the days of chivalry. "Our
   representation," says he, "has been found perfectly adequate to all the
   purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or
   devised." "I defy," continues he, "the enemies of our constitution to show
   the contrary."- This declaration from a man who has been in constant
   opposition to all the measures of parliament the whole of his political
   life, a year or two excepted, is most extraordinary; and, comparing him
   with himself, admits of no other alternative, than that he acted against
   his judgment as a member, or has declared contrary to it as an author.

   But it is not in the representation only that the defects lie, and
   therefore I proceed in the next place to the aristocracy.

   What is called the House of Peers, is constituted on a ground very similar
   to that, against which there is no law in other cases. It amounts to a
   combination of persons in one common interest. No better reason can be
   given, why a house of legislation should be composed entirely of men whose
   occupation consists in letting landed property, than why it should be
   composed of those who hire, or of brewers, or bakers, or any other
   separate class of men. Mr. Burke calls this house "the great ground and
   pillar of security to the landed interest." Let us examine this idea.

   What pillar of security does the landed interest require more than any
   other interest in the state, or what right has it to a distinct and
   separate representation from the general interest of a nation? The only
   use to be made of this power (and which it always has made), is to ward
   off taxes from itself, and throw the burthen upon those articles of
   consumption by which itself would be least affected.

   That this has been the consequence (and will always be the consequence) of
   constructing governments on combinations, is evident with respect to
   England, from the history of its taxes.

   Notwithstanding taxes have increased and multiplied upon every article of
   common consumption, the land-tax, which more particularly affects this
   "pillar," has diminished. In 1778 the amount of the land-tax was
   L1,950,000, which is half-a-million less than it produced almost a hundred
   years ago,*[30] notwithstanding the rentals are in many instances doubled
   since that period.

   Before the coming of the Hanoverians, the taxes were divided in nearly
   equal proportions between the land and articles of consumption, the land
   bearing rather the largest share: but since that era nearly thirteen
   millions annually of new taxes have been thrown upon consumption. The
   consequence of which has been a constant increase in the number and
   wretchedness of the poor, and in the amount of the poor-rates. Yet here
   again the burthen does not fall in equal proportions on the aristocracy
   with the rest of the community. Their residences, whether in town or
   country, are not mixed with the habitations of the poor. They live apart
   from distress, and the expense of relieving it. It is in manufacturing
   towns and labouring villages that those burthens press the heaviest; in
   many of which it is one class of poor supporting another.

   Several of the most heavy and productive taxes are so contrived, as to
   give an exemption to this pillar, thus standing in its own defence. The
   tax upon beer brewed for sale does not affect the aristocracy, who brew
   their own beer free from this duty. It falls only on those who have not
   conveniency or ability to brew, and who must purchase it in small
   quantities. But what will mankind think of the justice of taxation, when
   they know that this tax alone, from which the aristocracy are from
   circumstances exempt, is nearly equal to the whole of the land-tax, being
   in the year 1788, and it is not less now, L1,666,152, and with its
   proportion of the taxes on malt and hops, it exceeds it.- That a single
   article, thus partially consumed, and that chiefly by the working part,
   should be subject to a tax, equal to that on the whole rental of a nation,
   is, perhaps, a fact not to be paralleled in the histories of revenues.

   This is one of the circumstances resulting from a house of legislation,
   composed on the ground of a combination of common interest; for whatever
   their separate politics as to parties may be, in this they are united.
   Whether a combination acts to raise the price of any article for sale, or
   rate of wages; or whether it acts to throw taxes from itself upon another
   class of the community, the principle and the effect are the same; and if
   the one be illegal, it will be difficult to show that the other ought to
   exist.

   It is no use to say that taxes are first proposed in the House of Commons;
   for as the other house has always a negative, it can always defend itself;
   and it would be ridiculous to suppose that its acquiescence in the
   measures to be proposed were not understood before hand. Besides which, it
   has obtained so much influence by borough-traffic, and so many of its
   relations and connections are distributed on both sides the commons, as to
   give it, besides an absolute negative in one house, a preponderancy in the
   other, in all matters of common concern.

   It is difficult to discover what is meant by the landed interest, if it
   does not mean a combination of aristocratical landholders, opposing their
   own pecuniary interest to that of the farmer, and every branch of trade,
   commerce, and manufacture. In all other respects it is the only interest
   that needs no partial protection. It enjoys the general protection of the
   world. Every individual, high or low, is interested in the fruits of the
   earth; men, women, and children, of all ages and degrees, will turn out to
   assist the farmer, rather than a harvest should not be got in; and they
   will not act thus by any other property. It is the only one for which the
   common prayer of mankind is put up, and the only one that can never fail
   from the want of means. It is the interest, not of the policy, but of the
   existence of man, and when it ceases, he must cease to be.

   No other interest in a nation stands on the same united support. Commerce,
   manufactures, arts, sciences, and everything else, compared with this, are
   supported but in parts. Their prosperity or their decay has not the same
   universal influence. When the valleys laugh and sing, it is not the farmer
   only, but all creation that rejoice. It is a prosperity that excludes all
   envy; and this cannot be said of anything else.

   Why then, does Mr. Burke talk of his house of peers as the pillar of the
   landed interest? Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed
   property would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing, and reaping would
   go on. The aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise
   the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared
   with the active world are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither
   collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment.

   Mr. Burke, in his first essay, called aristocracy "the Corinthian capital
   of polished society." Towards completing the figure, he has now added the
   pillar; but still the base is wanting; and whenever a nation choose to act
   a Samson, not blind, but bold, down will go the temple of Dagon, the Lords
   and the Philistines.

   If a house of legislation is to be composed of men of one class, for the
   purpose of protecting a distinct interest, all the other interests should
   have the same. The inequality, as well as the burthen of taxation, arises
   from admitting it in one case, and not in all. Had there been a house of
   farmers, there had been no game laws; or a house of merchants and
   manufacturers, the taxes had neither been so unequal nor so excessive. It
   is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so
   great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a
   check.

   Men of small or moderate estates are more injured by the taxes being
   thrown on articles of consumption, than they are eased by warding it from
   landed property, for the following reasons:

   First, They consume more of the productive taxable articles, in proportion
   to their property, than those of large estates.

   Secondly, Their residence is chiefly in towns, and their property in
   houses; and the increase of the poor-rates, occasioned by taxes on
   consumption, is in much greater proportion than the land-tax has been
   favoured. In Birmingham, the poor-rates are not less than seven shillings
   in the pound. From this, as is already observed, the aristocracy are in a
   great measure exempt.

   These are but a part of the mischiefs flowing from the wretched scheme of
   an house of peers.

   As a combination, it can always throw a considerable portion of taxes from
   itself; and as an hereditary house, accountable to nobody, it resembles a
   rotten borough, whose consent is to be courted by interest. There are but
   few of its members, who are not in some mode or other participators, or
   disposers of the public money. One turns a candle-holder, or a lord in
   waiting; another a lord of the bed-chamber, a groom of the stole, or any
   insignificant nominal office to which a salary is annexed, paid out of the
   public taxes, and which avoids the direct appearance of corruption. Such
   situations are derogatory to the character of man; and where they can be
   submitted to, honour cannot reside.

   To all these are to be added the numerous dependants, the long list of
   younger branches and distant relations, who are to be provided for at the
   public expense: in short, were an estimation to be made of the charge of
   aristocracy to a nation, it will be found nearly equal to that of
   supporting the poor. The Duke of Richmond alone (and there are cases
   similar to his) takes away as much for himself as would maintain two
   thousand poor and aged persons. Is it, then, any wonder, that under such a
   system of government, taxes and rates have multiplied to their present
   extent?

   In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language,
   dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only
   refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards
   I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and
   imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view
   things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the
   world, and my religion is to do good.

   Mr. Burke, in speaking of the aristocratical law of primogeniture, says,
   "it is the standing law of our landed inheritance; and which, without
   question, has a tendency, and I think," continues he, "a happy tendency,
   to preserve a character of weight and consequence."

   Mr. Burke may call this law what he pleases, but humanity and impartial
   reflection will denounce it as a law of brutal injustice. Were we not
   accustomed to the daily practice, and did we only hear of it as the law of
   some distant part of the world, we should conclude that the legislators of
   such countries had not arrived at a state of civilisation.

   As to its preserving a character of weight and consequence, the case
   appears to me directly the reverse. It is an attaint upon character; a
   sort of privateering on family property. It may have weight among
   dependent tenants, but it gives none on a scale of national, and much less
   of universal character. Speaking for myself, my parents were not able to
   give me a shilling, beyond what they gave me in education; and to do this
   they distressed themselves: yet, I possess more of what is called
   consequence, in the world, than any one in Mr. Burke's catalogue of
   aristocrats.

   Having thus glanced at some of the defects of the two houses of
   parliament, I proceed to what is called the crown, upon which I shall be
   very concise.

   It signifies a nominal office of a million sterling a year, the business
   of which consists in receiving the money. Whether the person be wise or
   foolish, sane or insane, a native or a foreigner, matters not. Every
   ministry acts upon the same idea that Mr. Burke writes, namely, that the
   people must be hood-winked, and held in superstitious ignorance by some
   bugbear or other; and what is called the crown answers this purpose, and
   therefore it answers all the purposes to be expected from it. This is more
   than can be said of the other two branches.

   The hazard to which this office is exposed in all countries, is not from
   anything that can happen to the man, but from what may happen to the
   nation- the danger of its coming to its senses.

   It has been customary to call the crown the executive power, and the
   custom is continued, though the reason has ceased.

   It was called the executive, because the person whom it signified used,
   formerly, to act in the character of a judge, in administering or
   executing the laws. The tribunals were then a part of the court. The
   power, therefore, which is now called the judicial, is what was called the
   executive and, consequently, one or other of the terms is redundant, and
   one of the offices useless. When we speak of the crown now, it means
   nothing; it signifies neither a judge nor a general: besides which it is
   the laws that govern, and not the man. The old terms are kept up, to give
   an appearance of consequence to empty forms; and the only effect they have
   is that of increasing expenses.

   Before I proceed to the means of rendering governments more conducive to
   the general happiness of mankind, than they are at present, it will not be
   improper to take a review of the progress of taxation in England.

   It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never
   taken off. However true this may have been of late, it was not always so.
   Either, therefore, the people of former times were more watchful over
   government than those of the present, or government was administered with
   less extravagance.

   It is now seven hundred years since the Norman conquest, and the
   establishment of what is called the crown. Taking this portion of time in
   seven separate periods of one hundred years each, the amount of the annual
   taxes, at each period, will be as follows:

   Annual taxes levied by William the Conqueror,

   beginning in the year 1066    L400,000

   Annual taxes at 100 years from the conquest (1166)    200,000

   Annual taxes at 200 years from the conquest (1266)    150,000

   Annual taxes at 300 years from the conquest (1366)    130,000

   Annual taxes at 400 years from the conquest (1466)    100,000

   These statements and those which follow, are taken from Sir John
   Sinclair's History of the Revenue; by which it appears, that taxes
   continued decreasing for four hundred years, at the expiration of which
   time they were reduced three-fourths, viz., from four hundred thousand
   pounds to one hundred thousand. The people of England of the present day,
   have a traditionary and historical idea of the bravery of their ancestors;
   but whatever their virtues or their vices might have been, they certainly
   were a people who would not be imposed upon, and who kept governments in
   awe as to taxation, if not as to principle. Though they were not able to
   expel the monarchical usurpation, they restricted it to a republican
   economy of taxes.

   Let us now review the remaining three hundred years:

   Annual amount of taxes at:

   500 years from the conquest (1566)      500,000

   600 years from the conquest (1666)    1,800,000

   the present time (1791)              17,000,000

   The difference between the first four hundred years and the last three, is
   so astonishing, as to warrant an opinion, that the national character of
   the English has changed. It would have been impossible to have dragooned
   the former English, into the excess of taxation that now exists; and when
   it is considered that the pay of the army, the navy, and of all the
   revenue officers, is the same now as it was about a hundred years ago,
   when the taxes were not above a tenth part of what they are at present, it
   appears impossible to account for the enormous increase and expenditure on
   any other ground, than extravagance, corruption, and intrigue.*[31]

   With the Revolution of 1688, and more so since the Hanover succession,
   came the destructive system of continental intrigues, and the rage for
   foreign wars and foreign dominion; systems of such secure mystery that the
   expenses admit of no accounts; a single line stands for millions. To what
   excess taxation might have extended had not the French revolution
   contributed to break up the system, and put an end to pretences, is
   impossible to say. Viewed, as that revolution ought to be, as the
   fortunate means of lessening the load of taxes of both countries, it is of
   as much importance to England as to France; and, if properly improved to
   all the advantages of which it is capable, and to which it leads, deserves
   as much celebration in one country as the other.

   In pursuing this subject, I shall begin with the matter that first
   presents itself, that of lessening the burthen of taxes; and shall then
   add such matter and propositions, respecting the three countries of
   England, France, and America, as the present prospect of things appears to
   justify: I mean, an alliance of the three, for the purposes that will be
   mentioned in their proper place.

   What has happened may happen again. By the statement before shown of the
   progress of taxation, it is seen that taxes have been lessened to a fourth
   part of what they had formerly been. Though the present circumstances do
   not admit of the same reduction, yet they admit of such a beginning, as
   may accomplish that end in less time than in the former case.

   The amount of taxes for the year ending at Michaelmas 1788, was as
   follows:

   Land-tax                             L 1,950,000

   Customs                                3,789,274

   Excise (including old and new malt)    6,751,727

   Stamps                                 1,278,214

   Miscellaneous taxes and incidents      1,803,755

   -------------------------------------------------

   L15,572,755

   Since the year 1788, upwards of one million new taxes have been laid on,
   besides the produce of the lotteries; and as the taxes have in general
   been more productive since than before, the amount may be taken, in round
   numbers, at L17,000,000. (The expense of collection and the drawbacks,
   which together amount to nearly two millions, are paid out of the gross
   amount; and the above is the net sum paid into the exchequer). This sum of
   seventeen millions is applied to two different purposes; the one to pay
   the interest of the National Debt, the other to the current expenses of
   each year. About nine millions are appropriated to the former; and the
   remainder, being nearly eight millions, to the latter. As to the million,
   said to be applied to the reduction of the debt, it is so much like paying
   with one hand and taking out with the other, as not to merit much notice.
   It happened, fortunately for France, that she possessed national domains
   for paying off her debt, and thereby lessening her taxes; but as this is
   not the case with England, her reduction of taxes can only take place by
   reducing the current expenses, which may now be done to the amount of four
   or five millions annually, as will hereafter appear. When this is
   accomplished it will more than counter-balance the enormous charge of the
   American war; and the saving will be from the same source from whence the
   evil arose. As to the national debt, however heavy the interest may be in
   taxes, yet, as it serves to keep alive a capital useful to commerce, it
   balances by its effects a considerable part of its own weight; and as the
   quantity of gold and silver is, by some means or other, short of its
   proper proportion, being not more than twenty millions, whereas it should
   be sixty (foreign intrigue, foreign wars, foreign dominions, will in a
   great measure account for the deficiency), it would, besides the
   injustice, be bad policy to extinguish a capital that serves to supply
   that defect. But with respect to the current expense, whatever is saved
   therefrom is gain. The excess may serve to keep corruption alive, but it
   has no re-action on credit and commerce, like the interest of the debt.

   It is now very probable that the English Government (I do not mean the
   nation) is unfriendly to the French Revolution. Whatever serves to expose
   the intrigue and lessen the influence of courts, by lessening taxation,
   will be unwelcome to those who feed upon the spoil. Whilst the clamour of
   French intrigue, arbitrary power, popery, and wooden shoes could be kept
   up, the nation was easily allured and alarmed into taxes. Those days are
   now past: deception, it is to be hoped, has reaped its last harvest, and
   better times are in prospect for both countries, and for the world.

   Taking it for granted that an alliance may be formed between England,
   France, and America for the purposes hereafter to be mentioned, the
   national expenses of France and England may consequently be lessened. The
   same fleets and armies will no longer be necessary to either, and the
   reduction can be made ship for ship on each side. But to accomplish these
   objects the governments must necessarily be fitted to a common and
   correspondent principle. Confidence can never take place while an hostile
   disposition remains in either, or where mystery and secrecy on one side is
   opposed to candour and openness on the other.

   These matters admitted, the national expenses might be put back, for the
   sake of a precedent, to what they were at some period when France and
   England were not enemies. This, consequently, must be prior to the Hanover
   succession, and also to the Revolution of 1688.*[32] The first instance
   that presents itself, antecedent to those dates, is in the very wasteful
   and profligate times of Charles the Second; at which time England and
   France acted as allies. If I have chosen a period of great extravagance,
   it will serve to show modern extravagance in a still worse light;
   especially as the pay of the navy, the army, and the revenue officers has
   not increased since that time.

   The peace establishment was then as follows (see Sir John Sinclair's
   History of the Revenue):

   Navy                 L  300,000

   Army                    212,000

   Ordnance                 40,000

   Civil List              462,115

   -------------------------------

   L1,014,115

   The parliament, however, settled the whole annual peace establishment at
   $1,200,000.*[33] If we go back to the time of Elizabeth the amount of all
   the taxes was but half a million, yet the nation sees nothing during that
   period that reproaches it with want of consequence.

   All circumstances, then, taken together, arising from the French
   revolution, from the approaching harmony and reciprocal interest of the
   two nations, the abolition of the court intrigue on both sides, and the
   progress of knowledge in the science of government, the annual expenditure
   might be put back to one million and a half, viz.:

   Navy                   L  500,000

   Army                      500,000

   Expenses of Government    500,000

   ---------------------------------

   L1,500,000

   Even this sum is six times greater than the expenses of government are in
   America, yet the civil internal government in England (I mean that
   administered by means of quarter sessions, juries and assize, and which,
   in fact, is nearly the whole, and performed by the nation), is less
   expense upon the revenue, than the same species and portion of government
   is in America.

   It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like
   animals, for the pleasure of their riders. To read the history of kings, a
   man would be almost inclined to suppose that government consisted in
   stag-hunting, and that every nation paid a million a-year to a huntsman.
   Man ought to have pride, or shame enough to blush at being thus imposed
   upon, and when he feels his proper character he will. Upon all subjects of
   this nature, there is often passing in the mind, a train of ideas he has
   not yet accustomed himself to encourage and communicate. Restrained by
   something that puts on the character of prudence, he acts the hypocrite
   upon himself as well as to others. It is, however, curious to observe how
   soon this spell can be dissolved. A single expression, boldly conceived
   and uttered, will sometimes put a whole company into their proper
   feelings: and whole nations are acted on in the same manner.

   As to the offices of which any civil government may be composed, it
   matters but little by what names they are described. In the routine of
   business, as before observed, whether a man be styled a president, a king,
   an emperor, a senator, or anything else, it is impossible that any service
   he can perform, can merit from a nation more than ten thousand pounds a
   year; and as no man should be paid beyond his services, so every man of a
   proper heart will not accept more. Public money ought to be touched with
   the most scrupulous consciousness of honour. It is not the produce of
   riches only, but of the hard earnings of labour and poverty. It is drawn
   even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or
   perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.

   Were it possible that the Congress of America could be so lost to their
   duty, and to the interest of their constituents, as to offer General
   Washington, as president of America, a million a year, he would not, and
   he could not, accept it. His sense of honour is of another kind. It has
   cost England almost seventy millions sterling, to maintain a family
   imported from abroad, of very inferior capacity to thousands in the
   nation; and scarcely a year has passed that has not produced some new
   mercenary application. Even the physicians' bills have been sent to the
   public to be paid. No wonder that jails are crowded, and taxes and
   poor-rates increased. Under such systems, nothing is to be looked for but
   what has already happened; and as to reformation, whenever it come, it
   must be from the nation, and not from the government.

   To show that the sum of five hundred thousand pounds is more than
   sufficient to defray all the expenses of the government, exclusive of
   navies and armies, the following estimate is added, for any country, of
   the same extent as England.

   In the first place, three hundred representatives fairly elected, are
   sufficient for all the purposes to which legislation can apply, and
   preferable to a larger number. They may be divided into two or three
   houses, or meet in one, as in France, or in any manner a constitution
   shall direct.

   As representation is always considered, in free countries, as the most
   honourable of all stations, the allowance made to it is merely to defray
   the expense which the representatives incur by that service, and not to it
   as an office.

   If an allowance, at the rate of five hundred pounds per annum, be made to
   every representative, deducting for non-attendance, the expense, if the
   whole number attended for six months, each year, would be L 75,00

   The official departments cannot reasonably exceed the following number,
   with the salaries annexed:

   Three offices at ten thousand pounds each             L 30,000

   Ten ditto, at five thousand pounds each                 50,000

   Twenty ditto, at two thousand pounds each               40,000

   Forty ditto, at one thousand pounds each                40,000

   Two hundred ditto, at five hundred pounds each         100,000

   Three hundred ditto, at two hundred pounds each         60,000

   Five hundred ditto, at one hundred pounds each          50,000

   Seven hundred ditto, at seventy-five pounds each        52,500

   --------------------------------------------------------------

   L497,500

   If a nation choose, it can deduct four per cent. from all offices, and
   make one of twenty thousand per annum.

   All revenue officers are paid out of the monies they collect, and
   therefore, are not in this estimation.

   The foregoing is not offered as an exact detail of offices, but to show
   the number of rate of salaries which five hundred thousand pounds will
   support; and it will, on experience, be found impracticable to find
   business sufficient to justify even this expense. As to the manner in
   which office business is now performed, the Chiefs, in several offices,
   such as the post-office, and certain offices in the exchequer, etc., do
   little more than sign their names three or four times a year; and the
   whole duty is performed by under-clerks.

   Taking, therefore, one million and a half as a sufficient peace
   establishment for all the honest purposes of government, which is three
   hundred thousand pounds more than the peace establishment in the
   profligate and prodigal times of Charles the Second (notwithstanding, as
   has been already observed, the pay and salaries of the army, navy, and
   revenue officers, continue the same as at that period), there will remain
   a surplus of upwards of six millions out of the present current expenses.
   The question then will be, how to dispose of this surplus.

   Whoever has observed the manner in which trade and taxes twist themselves
   together, must be sensible of the impossibility of separating them
   suddenly.

   First. Because the articles now on hand are already charged with the duty,
   and the reduction cannot take place on the present stock.

   Secondly. Because, on all those articles on which the duty is charged in
   the gross, such as per barrel, hogshead, hundred weight, or ton, the
   abolition of the duty does not admit of being divided down so as fully to
   relieve the consumer, who purchases by the pint, or the pound. The last
   duty laid on strong beer and ale was three shillings per barrel, which, if
   taken off, would lessen the purchase only half a farthing per pint, and
   consequently, would not reach to practical relief.

   This being the condition of a great part of the taxes, it will be
   necessary to look for such others as are free from this embarrassment and
   where the relief will be direct and visible, and capable of immediate
   operation.

   In the first place, then, the poor-rates are a direct tax which every
   house-keeper feels, and who knows also, to a farthing, the sum which he
   pays. The national amount of the whole of the poor-rates is not positively
   known, but can be procured. Sir John Sinclair, in his History of the
   Revenue has stated it at L2,100,587. A considerable part of which is
   expended in litigations, in which the poor, instead of being relieved, are
   tormented. The expense, however, is the same to the parish from whatever
   cause it arises.

   In Birmingham, the amount of poor-rates is fourteen thousand pounds a
   year. This, though a large sum, is moderate, compared with the population.
   Birmingham is said to contain seventy thousand souls, and on a proportion
   of seventy thousand to fourteen thousand pounds poor-rates, the national
   amount of poor-rates, taking the population of England as seven millions,
   would be but one million four hundred thousand pounds. It is, therefore,
   most probable, that the population of Birmingham is over-rated. Fourteen
   thousand pounds is the proportion upon fifty thousand souls, taking two
   millions of poor-rates, as the national amount.

   Be it, however, what it may, it is no other than the consequence of
   excessive burthen of taxes, for, at the time when the taxes were very low,
   the poor were able to maintain themselves; and there were no
   poor-rates.*[34] In the present state of things a labouring man, with a
   wife or two or three children, does not pay less than between seven and
   eight pounds a year in taxes. He is not sensible of this, because it is
   disguised to him in the articles which he buys, and he thinks only of
   their dearness; but as the taxes take from him, at least, a fourth part of
   his yearly earnings, he is consequently disabled from providing for a
   family, especially, if himself, or any of them, are afflicted with
   sickness.

   The first step, therefore, of practical relief, would be to abolish the
   poor-rates entirely, and in lieu thereof, to make a remission of taxes to
   the poor of double the amount of the present poor-rates, viz., four
   millions annually out of the surplus taxes. By this measure, the poor
   would be benefited two millions, and the house-keepers two millions. This
   alone would be equal to a reduction of one hundred and twenty millions of
   the National Debt, and consequently equal to the whole expense of the
   American War.

   It will then remain to be considered, which is the most effectual mode of
   distributing this remission of four millions.

   It is easily seen, that the poor are generally composed of large families
   of children, and old people past their labour. If these two classes are
   provided for, the remedy will so far reach to the full extent of the case,
   that what remains will be incidental, and, in a great measure, fall within
   the compass of benefit clubs, which, though of humble invention, merit to
   be ranked among the best of modern institutions.

   Admitting England to contain seven millions of souls; if one-fifth thereof
   are of that class of poor which need support, the number will be one
   million four hundred thousand. Of this number, one hundred and forty
   thousand will be aged poor, as will be hereafter shown, and for which a
   distinct provision will be proposed.

   There will then remain one million two hundred and sixty thousand which,
   at five souls to each family, amount to two hundred and fifty-two thousand
   families, rendered poor from the expense of children and the weight of
   taxes.

   The number of children under fourteen years of age, in each of those
   families, will be found to be about five to every two families; some
   having two, and others three; some one, and others four: some none, and
   others five; but it rarely happens that more than five are under fourteen
   years of age, and after this age they are capable of service or of being
   apprenticed.

   Allowing five children (under fourteen years) to every two families, the
   number of children will be 630,000, the number of parents, were they all
   living, would be 504,000

   It is certain, that if the children are provided for, the parents are
   relieved of consequence, because it is from the expense of bringing up
   children that their poverty arises.

   Having thus ascertained the greatest number that can be supposed to need
   support on account of young families, I proceed to the mode of relief or
   distribution, which is,

   To pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus
   taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under
   fourteen years of age; enjoining the parents of such children to send them
   to school, to learn reading, writing, and common arithmetic; the ministers
   of every parish, of every denomination to certify jointly to an office,
   for that purpose, that this duty is performed. The amount of this expense
   will be,

   For six hundred and thirty thousand children at four pounds per annum each
   L2,520,000

   By adopting this method, not only the poverty of the parents will be
   relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and
   the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities, by
   the aid of education, will be greater. Many a youth, with good natural
   genius, who is apprenticed to a mechanical trade, such as a carpenter,
   joiner, millwright, shipwright, blacksmith, etc., is prevented getting
   forward the whole of his life from the want of a little common education
   when a boy.

   I now proceed to the case of the aged.

   I divide age into two classes. First, the approach of age, beginning at
   fifty. Secondly, old age commencing at sixty.

   At fifty, though the mental faculties of man are in full vigour, and his
   judgment better than at any preceding date, the bodily powers for
   laborious life are on the decline. He cannot bear the same quantity of
   fatigue as at an earlier period. He begins to earn less, and is less
   capable of enduring wind and weather; and in those more retired
   employments where much sight is required, he fails apace, and sees
   himself, like an old horse, beginning to be turned adrift.

   At sixty his labour ought to be over, at least from direct necessity. It
   is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called
   civilised countries, for daily bread.

   To form some judgment of the number of those above fifty years of age, I
   have several times counted the persons I met in the streets of London,
   men, women, and children, and have generally found that the average is
   about one in sixteen or seventeen. If it be said that aged persons do not
   come much into the streets, so neither do infants; and a great proportion
   of grown children are in schools and in work-shops as apprentices. Taking,
   then, sixteen for a divisor, the whole number of persons in England of
   fifty years and upwards, of both sexes, rich and poor, will be four
   hundred and twenty thousand.

   The persons to be provided for out of this gross number will be
   husbandmen, common labourers, journeymen of every trade and their wives,
   sailors, and disbanded soldiers, worn out servants of both sexes, and poor
   widows.

   There will be also a considerable number of middling tradesmen, who having
   lived decently in the former part of life, begin, as age approaches, to
   lose their business, and at last fall to decay.

   Besides these there will be constantly thrown off from the revolutions of
   that wheel which no man can stop nor regulate, a number from every class
   of life connected with commerce and adventure.

   To provide for all those accidents, and whatever else may befall, I take
   the number of persons who, at one time or other of their lives, after
   fifty years of age, may feel it necessary or comfortable to be better
   supported, than they can support themselves, and that not as a matter of
   grace and favour, but of right, at one-third of the whole number, which is
   one hundred and forty thousand, as stated in a previous page, and for whom
   a distinct provision was proposed to be made. If there be more, society,
   notwithstanding the show and pomposity of government, is in a deplorable
   condition in England.

   Of this one hundred and forty thousand, I take one half, seventy thousand,
   to be of the age of fifty and under sixty, and the other half to be sixty
   years and upwards. Having thus ascertained the probable proportion of the
   number of aged persons, I proceed to the mode of rendering their condition
   comfortable, which is:

   To pay to every such person of the age of fifty years, and until he shall
   arrive at the age of sixty, the sum of six pounds per annum out of the
   surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of
   sixty. The expense of which will be,

   Seventy thousand persons, at L6 per annum      L  420,000

   Seventy thousand persons, at L10 per annum        700,000

   ---------------------------------------------------------

   L1,120,000

   This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but
   of a right. Every person in England, male and female, pays on an average
   in taxes two pounds eight shillings and sixpence per annum from the day of
   his (or her) birth; and, if the expense of collection be added, he pays
   two pounds eleven shillings and sixpence; consequently, at the end of
   fifty years he has paid one hundred and twenty-eight pounds fifteen
   shillings; and at sixty one hundred and fifty-four pounds ten shillings.
   Converting, therefore, his (or her) individual tax in a tontine, the money
   he shall receive after fifty years is but little more than the legal
   interest of the net money he has paid; the rest is made up from those
   whose circumstances do not require them to draw such support, and the
   capital in both cases defrays the expenses of government. It is on this
   ground that I have extended the probable claims to one-third of the number
   of aged persons in the nation.- Is it, then, better that the lives of one
   hundred and forty thousand aged persons be rendered comfortable, or that a
   million a year of public money be expended on any one individual, and him
   often of the most worthless or insignificant character? Let reason and
   justice, let honour and humanity, let even hypocrisy, sycophancy and Mr.
   Burke, let George, let Louis, Leopold, Frederic, Catherine, Cornwallis, or
   Tippoo Saib, answer the question.*[35]

   The sum thus remitted to the poor will be,

   To two hundred and fifty-two thousand poor families,

   containing six hundred and thirty thousand children  L2,520,000

   To one hundred and forty thousand aged persons        1,120,000

   -----------------------------------------------------------------

   L3,640,000

   There will then remain three hundred and sixty thousand pounds out of the
   four millions, part of which may be applied as follows:-

   After all the above cases are provided for there will still be a number of
   families who, though not properly of the class of poor, yet find it
   difficult to give education to their children; and such children, under
   such a case, would be in a worse condition than if their parents were
   actually poor. A nation under a well-regulated government should permit
   none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical
   government only that requires ignorance for its support.

   Suppose, then, four hundred thousand children to be in this condition,
   which is a greater number than ought to be supposed after the provisions
   already made, the method will be:

   To allow for each of those children ten shillings a year for the expense
   of schooling for six years each, which will give them six months schooling
   each year, and half a crown a year for paper and spelling books.

   The expense of this will be annually L250,000.*[36]

   There will then remain one hundred and ten thousand pounds.

   Notwithstanding the great modes of relief which the best instituted and
   best principled government may devise, there will be a number of smaller
   cases, which it is good policy as well as beneficence in a nation to
   consider.

   Were twenty shillings to be given immediately on the birth of a child, to
   every woman who should make the demand, and none will make it whose
   circumstances do not require it, it might relieve a great deal of instant
   distress.

   There are about two hundred thousand births yearly in England; and if
   claimed by one fourth, the amount would be L50,000

   And twenty shillings to every new-married couple who should claim in like
   manner. This would not exceed the sum of L20,000.

   Also twenty thousand pounds to be appropriated to defray the funeral
   expenses of persons, who, travelling for work, may die at a distance from
   their friends. By relieving parishes from this charge, the sick stranger
   will be better treated.

   I shall finish this part of the subject with a plan adapted to the
   particular condition of a metropolis, such as London.

   Cases are continually occurring in a metropolis, different from those
   which occur in the country, and for which a different, or rather an
   additional, mode of relief is necessary. In the country, even in large
   towns, people have a knowledge of each other, and distress never rises to
   that extreme height it sometimes does in a metropolis. There is no such
   thing in the country as persons, in the literal sense of the word, starved
   to death, or dying with cold from the want of a lodging. Yet such cases,
   and others equally as miserable, happen in London.

   Many a youth comes up to London full of expectations, and with little or
   no money, and unless he get immediate employment he is already half
   undone; and boys bred up in London without any means of a livelihood, and
   as it often happens of dissolute parents, are in a still worse condition;
   and servants long out of place are not much better off. In short, a world
   of little cases is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows
   not of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the
   postponable wants, and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is
   often the crisis of a life of ruin.

   These circumstances which are the general cause of the little thefts and
   pilferings that lead to greater, may be prevented. There yet remain twenty
   thousand pounds out of the four millions of surplus taxes, which with
   another fund hereafter to be mentioned, amounting to about twenty thousand
   pounds more, cannot be better applied than to this purpose. The plan will
   then be:

   First, To erect two or more buildings, or take some already erected,
   capable of containing at least six thousand persons, and to have in each
   of these places as many kinds of employment as can be contrived, so that
   every person who shall come may find something which he or she can do.

   Secondly, To receive all who shall come, without enquiring who or what
   they are. The only condition to be, that for so much, or so many hours'
   work, each person shall receive so many meals of wholesome food, and a
   warm lodging, at least as good as a barrack. That a certain portion of
   what each person's work shall be worth shall be reserved, and given to him
   or her, on their going away; and that each person shall stay as long or as
   short a time, or come as often as he choose, on these conditions.

   If each person stayed three months, it would assist by rotation
   twenty-four thousand persons annually, though the real number, at all
   times, would be but six thousand. By establishing an asylum of this kind,
   such persons to whom temporary distresses occur, would have an opportunity
   to recruit themselves, and be enabled to look out for better employment.

   Allowing that their labour paid but one half the expense of supporting
   them, after reserving a portion of their earnings for themselves, the sum
   of forty thousand pounds additional would defray all other charges for
   even a greater number than six thousand.

   The fund very properly convertible to this purpose, in addition to the
   twenty thousand pounds, remaining of the former fund, will be the produce
   of the tax upon coals, so iniquitously and wantonly applied to the support
   of the Duke of Richmond. It is horrid that any man, more especially at the
   price coals now are, should live on the distresses of a community; and any
   government permitting such an abuse, deserves to be dismissed. This fund
   is said to be about twenty thousand pounds per annum.

   I shall now conclude this plan with enumerating the several particulars,
   and then proceed to other matters.

   The enumeration is as follows:--

   First, Abolition of two millions poor-rates.

   Secondly, Provision for two hundred and fifty thousand poor families.

   Thirdly, Education for one million and thirty thousand children.

   Fourthly, Comfortable provision for one hundred and forty thousand aged
   persons.

   Fifthly, Donation of twenty shillings each for fifty thousand births.

   Sixthly, Donation of twenty shillings each for twenty thousand marriages.

   Seventhly, Allowance of twenty thousand pounds for the funeral expenses of
   persons travelling for work, and dying at a distance from their friends.

   Eighthly, Employment, at all times, for the casual poor in the cities of
   London and Westminster.

   By the operation of this plan, the poor laws, those instruments of civil
   torture, will be superseded, and the wasteful expense of litigation
   prevented. The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and
   hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age, begging
   for bread. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to
   breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish. Widows will have
   a maintenance for their children, and not be carted away, on the death of
   their husbands, like culprits and criminals; and children will no longer
   be considered as increasing the distresses of their parents. The haunts of
   the wretched will be known, because it will be to their advantage; and the
   number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be
   lessened. The poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the
   support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults
   will cease.- Ye who sit in ease, and solace yourselves in plenty, and such
   there are in Turkey and Russia, as well as in England, and who say to
   yourselves, "Are we not well off?" have ye thought of these things? When
   ye do, ye will cease to speak and feel for yourselves alone.

   The plan is easy in practice. It does not embarrass trade by a sudden
   interruption in the order of taxes, but effects the relief by changing the
   application of them; and the money necessary for the purpose can be drawn
   from the excise collections, which are made eight times a year in every
   market town in England.

   Having now arranged and concluded this subject, I proceed to the next.

   Taking the present current expenses at seven millions and an half, which
   is the least amount they are now at, there will remain (after the sum of
   one million and an half be taken for the new current expenses and four
   millions for the before-mentioned service) the sum of two millions; part
   of which to be applied as follows:

   Though fleets and armies, by an alliance with France, will, in a great
   measure, become useless, yet the persons who have devoted themselves to
   those services, and have thereby unfitted themselves for other lines of
   life, are not to be sufferers by the means that make others happy. They
   are a different description of men from those who form or hang about a
   court.

   A part of the army will remain, at least for some years, and also of the
   navy, for which a provision is already made in the former part of this
   plan of one million, which is almost half a million more than the peace
   establishment of the army and navy in the prodigal times of Charles the
   Second.

   Suppose, then, fifteen thousand soldiers to be disbanded, and that an
   allowance be made to each of three shillings a week during life, clear of
   all deductions, to be paid in the same manner as the Chelsea College
   pensioners are paid, and for them to return to their trades and their
   friends; and also that an addition of fifteen thousand sixpences per week
   be made to the pay of the soldiers who shall remain; the annual expenses
   will be:

   To the pay of fifteen thousand disbanded soldiers

   at three shillings per week                        L117,000

   Additional pay to the remaining soldiers             19,500

   Suppose that the pay to the officers of the

   disbanded corps be the same amount as sum allowed

   to the men                                          117,000

   -----------------------------------------------------------

   L253,500

   To prevent bulky estimations, admit the same sum

   to the disbanded navy as to the army,

   and the same increase of pay                        253,500

   -----------------------------------------------------------

   Total             L507,000

   Every year some part of this sum of half a million (I omit the odd seven
   thousand pounds for the purpose of keeping the account unembarrassed) will
   fall in, and the whole of it in time, as it is on the ground of life
   annuities, except the increased pay of twenty-nine thousand pounds. As it
   falls in, part of the taxes may be taken off; and as, for instance, when
   thirty thousand pounds fall in, the duty on hops may be wholly taken off;
   and as other parts fall in, the duties on candles and soap may be
   lessened, till at last they will totally cease. There now remains at least
   one million and a half of surplus taxes.

   The tax on houses and windows is one of those direct taxes, which, like
   the poor-rates, is not confounded with trade; and, when taken off, the
   relief will be instantly felt. This tax falls heavy on the middle class of
   people. The amount of this tax, by the returns of 1788, was:

   Houses and windows:                       L       s.    d.

    By the act of 1766                    385,459    11    7

   By the act be 1779                    130,739    14    5 1/2

   -------------------------------------------------------------

   Total        516,199     6    0 1/2

   If this tax be struck off, there will then remain about one million of
   surplus taxes; and as it is always proper to keep a sum in reserve, for
   incidental matters, it may be best not to extend reductions further in the
   first instance, but to consider what may be accomplished by other modes of
   reform.

   Among the taxes most heavily felt is the commutation tax. I shall
   therefore offer a plan for its abolition, by substituting another in its
   place, which will effect three objects at once: 1, that of removing the
   burthen to where it can best be borne; 2, restoring justice among families
   by a distribution of property; 3, extirpating the overgrown influence
   arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture, which is one of the
   principal sources of corruption at elections. The amount of commutation
   tax by the returns of 1788, was L771,657.

   When taxes are proposed, the country is amused by the plausible language
   of taxing luxuries. One thing is called a luxury at one time, and
   something else at another; but the real luxury does not consist in the
   article, but in the means of procuring it, and this is always kept out of
   sight.

   I know not why any plant or herb of the field should be a greater luxury
   in one country than another; but an overgrown estate in either is a luxury
   at all times, and, as such, is the proper object of taxation. It is,
   therefore, right to take those kind tax-making gentlemen up on their own
   word, and argue on the principle themselves have laid down, that of taxing
   luxuries. If they or their champion, Mr. Burke, who, I fear, is growing
   out of date, like the man in armour, can prove that an estate of twenty,
   thirty, or forty thousand pounds a year is not a luxury, I will give up
   the argument.

   Admitting that any annual sum, say, for instance, one thousand pounds, is
   necessary or sufficient for the support of a family, consequently the
   second thousand is of the nature of a luxury, the third still more so, and
   by proceeding on, we shall at last arrive at a sum that may not improperly
   be called a prohibitable luxury. It would be impolitic to set bounds to
   property acquired by industry, and therefore it is right to place the
   prohibition beyond the probable acquisition to which industry can extend;
   but there ought to be a limit to property or the accumulation of it by
   bequest. It should pass in some other line. The richest in every nation
   have poor relations, and those often very near in consanguinity.

   The following table of progressive taxation is constructed on the above
   principles, and as a substitute for the commutation tax. It will reach the
   point of prohibition by a regular operation, and thereby supersede the
   aristocratical law of primogeniture.

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   TABLE I

   A tax on all estates of the clear yearly value of L50,

   after deducting the land tax, and up

   To L500                      0s   3d per pound

   From L500 to L1,000          0    6

   On the second   thousand     0    9

   On the third         "       1    0

   On the fourth        "       1    6

   On the fifth         "       2    0

   On the sixth         "       3    0

   On the seventh       "       4    0

   On the eighth        "       5    0

   On the ninth         "       6s   0d per pound

   On the tenth         "       7    0

   On the eleventh      "       8    0

   On the twelfth       "       9    0

   On the thirteenth    "      10    0

   On the fourteenth    "      11    0

   On the fifteenth     "      12    0

   On the sixteenth     "      13    0

   On the seventeenth   "      14    0

   On the eighteenth    "      15    0

   On the nineteenth    "      16    0

   On the twentieth     "      17    0

   On the twenty-first  "      18    0

   On the twenty-second "      19    0

   On the twenty-third  "      20    0

   The foregoing table shows the progression per pound on every progressive
   thousand. The following table shows the amount of the tax on every
   thousand separately, and in the last column the total amount of all the
   separate sums collected.

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   TABLE II

   An estate of:

   L 50 per annum      at 3d per pound pays      L0   12   6

   100  "    "           "             "         1    5   0

   200  "    "           "             "         2   10   0

   300  "    "           "             "         3   15   0

   400  "    "           "             "         5    0   0

   500  "    "           "             "         7    5   0

   After L500, the tax of 6d. per pound takes place on the second L500;
   consequently an estate of L1,000 per annum pays L2l, 15s., and so on.

   For the 1st L500 at   0s   3d per pound   L7   5s

   2nd   "       0    6              14  10     L21   15s

   2nd 1000 at   0    9              37  11      59    5

   3rd   "       1    0              50   0     109    5

   4th 1000 at   1s   6d per pound  L75   0s   L184    5s

   5th   "       2    0             100   0     284    5

   6th   "       3    0             150   0     434    5

   7th   "       4    0             200   0     634    5

   8th   "       5    0             250   0     880    5

   9th   "       6    0             300   0    1100    5

   10th   "       7    0             350   0    1530    5

   11th   "       8    0             400   0    1930    5

   12th   "       9    0             450   0    2380    5

   13th   "      10    0             500   0    2880    5

   14th   "      11    0             550   0    3430    5

   15th   "      12    0             600   0    4030    5

   16th   "      13    0             650   0    4680    5

   17th   "      14    0             700   0    5380    5

   18th   "      15    0             750   0    6130    5

   19th   "      16    0             800   0    6930    5

   20th   "      17    0             850   0    7780    5

   21st   "      18    0             900   0    8680    5

   22nd 1000 at  19s   0d per pound L950   0s  L9630    5s

   23rd   "      20    0            1000   0   10630    5

   At the twenty-third thousand the tax becomes 20s. in the pound, and
   consequently every thousand beyond that sum can produce no profit but by
   dividing the estate. Yet formidable as this tax appears, it will not, I
   believe, produce so much as the commutation tax; should it produce more,
   it ought to be lowered to that amount upon estates under two or three
   thousand a year.

   On small and middling estates it is lighter (as it is intended to be) than
   the commutation tax. It is not till after seven or eight thousand a year
   that it begins to be heavy. The object is not so much the produce of the
   tax as the justice of the measure. The aristocracy has screened itself too
   much, and this serves to restore a part of the lost equilibrium.

   As an instance of its screening itself, it is only necessary to look back
   to the first establishment of the excise laws, at what is called the
   Restoration, or the coming of Charles the Second. The aristocratical
   interest then in power, commuted the feudal services itself was under, by
   laying a tax on beer brewed for sale; that is, they compounded with
   Charles for an exemption from those services for themselves and their
   heirs, by a tax to be paid by other people. The aristocracy do not
   purchase beer brewed for sale, but brew their own beer free of the duty,
   and if any commutation at that time were necessary, it ought to have been
   at the expense of those for whom the exemptions from those services were
   intended;*[37] instead of which, it was thrown on an entirely different
   class of men.

   But the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of
   rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to
   extirpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of
   primogeniture, and which is one of the principal sources of corruption at
   elections.

   It would be attended with no good consequences to enquire how such vast
   estates as thirty, forty, or fifty thousand a year could commence, and
   that at a time when commerce and manufactures were not in a state to admit
   of such acquisitions. Let it be sufficient to remedy the evil by putting
   them in a condition of descending again to the community by the quiet
   means of apportioning them among all the heirs and heiresses of those
   families. This will be the more necessary, because hitherto the
   aristocracy have quartered their younger children and connections upon the
   public in useless posts, places and offices, which when abolished will
   leave them destitute, unless the law of primogeniture be also abolished or
   superseded.

   A progressive tax will, in a great measure, effect this object, and that
   as a matter of interest to the parties most immediately concerned, as will
   be seen by the following table; which shows the net produce upon every
   estate, after subtracting the tax. By this it will appear that after an
   estate exceeds thirteen or fourteen thousand a year, the remainder
   produces but little profit to the holder, and consequently, Will pass
   either to the younger children, or to other kindred.

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------

   TABLE III

   Showing the net produce of every estate from one thousand to twenty-three
   thousand pounds a year

   No of thousand       Total tax

   per annum         subtracted       Net produce

   L1000             L21              L979

   2000               59               1941

   3000              109               2891

   4000              184               3816

   5000              284               4716

   6000              434               5566

   7000              634               6366

   8000              880               7120

   9000             1100               7900

   10,000           1530               8470

   11,000           1930               9070

   12,000           2380               9620

   13,000           2880             10,120

   14,000           3430             10,570

   15,000           4030             10,970

   16,000           4680             11,320

   17,000           5380             11,620

   18,000           6130             11,870

   19,000           6930             12,170

   20,000           7780             12,220

   21,000           8680             12,320

   22,000           9630             12,370

   23,000         10,630             12,370

   N.B. The odd shillings are dropped in this table.

   According to this table, an estate cannot produce more than L12,370 clear
   of the land tax and the progressive tax, and therefore the dividing such
   estates will follow as a matter of family interest. An estate of L23,000 a
   year, divided into five estates of four thousand each and one of three,
   will be charged only L1,129 which is but five per cent., but if held by
   one possessor, will be charged L10,630.

   Although an enquiry into the origin of those estates be unnecessary, the
   continuation of them in their present state is another subject. It is a
   matter of national concern. As hereditary estates, the law has created the
   evil, and it ought also to provide the remedy. Primogeniture ought to be
   abolished, not only because it is unnatural and unjust, but because the
   country suffers by its operation. By cutting off (as before observed) the
   younger children from their proper portion of inheritance, the public is
   loaded with the expense of maintaining them; and the freedom of elections
   violated by the overbearing influence which this unjust monopoly of family
   property produces. Nor is this all. It occasions a waste of national
   property. A considerable part of the land of the country is rendered
   unproductive, by the great extent of parks and chases which this law
   serves to keep up, and this at a time when the annual production of grain
   is not equal to the national consumption.*[38]- In short, the evils of the
   aristocratical system are so great and numerous, so inconsistent with
   every thing that is just, wise, natural, and beneficent, that when they
   are considered, there ought not to be a doubt that many, who are now
   classed under that description, will wish to see such a system abolished.

   What pleasure can they derive from contemplating the exposed condition,
   and almost certain beggary of their younger offspring? Every
   aristocratical family has an appendage of family beggars hanging round it,
   which in a few ages, or a few generations, are shook off, and console
   themselves with telling their tale in almshouses, workhouses, and prisons.
   This is the natural consequence of aristocracy. The peer and the beggar
   are often of the same family. One extreme produces the other: to make one
   rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other
   means.

   There are two classes of people to whom the laws of England are
   particularly hostile, and those the most helpless; younger children, and
   the poor. Of the former I have just spoken; of the latter I shall mention
   one instance out of the many that might be produced, and with which I
   shall close this subject.

   Several laws are in existence for regulating and limiting work-men's
   wages. Why not leave them as free to make their own bargains, as the
   law-makers are to let their farms and houses? Personal labour is all the
   property they have. Why is that little, and the little freedom they enjoy,
   to be infringed? But the injustice will appear stronger, if we consider
   the operation and effect of such laws. When wages are fixed by what is
   called a law, the legal wages remain stationary, while every thing else is
   in progression; and as those who make that law still continue to lay on
   new taxes by other laws, they increase the expense of living by one law,
   and take away the means by another.

   But if these gentlemen law-makers and tax-makers thought it right to limit
   the poor pittance which personal labour can produce, and on which a whole
   family is to be supported, they certainly must feel themselves happily
   indulged in a limitation on their own part, of not less than twelve
   thousand a-year, and that of property they never acquired (nor probably
   any of their ancestors), and of which they have made never acquire so ill
   a use.

   Having now finished this subject, I shall bring the several particulars
   into one view, and then proceed to other matters.

   The first eight articles, mentioned earlier, are;

   1. Abolition of two millions poor-rates.
   2. Provision for two hundred and fifty-two thousand poor families, at the
   rate of four pounds per head for each child under fourteen years of
   age; which, with the addition of two hundred and fifty thousand
   pounds, provides also education for one million and thirty thousand
   children.
   3. Annuity of six pounds (per annum) each for all poor persons, decayed
   tradesmen, and others (supposed seventy thousand) of the age of fifty
   years, and until sixty.
   4. Annuity of ten pounds each for life for all poor persons, decayed
   tradesmen, and others (supposed seventy thousand) of the age of sixty
   years.
   5. Donation of twenty shillings each for fifty thousand births.
   6. Donation of twenty shillings each for twenty thousand marriages.
   7. Allowance of twenty thousand pounds for the funeral expenses of
   persons travelling for work, and dying at a distance from their
   friends.
   8. Employment at all times for the casual poor in the cities of London
   and Westminster.

   Second Enumeration

   9. Abolition of the tax on houses and windows.
   10. Allowance of three shillings per week for life to fifteen thousand
   disbanded soldiers, and a proportionate allowance to the officers of
   the disbanded corps.
   11. Increase of pay to the remaining soldiers of L19,500 annually.
   12. The same allowance to the disbanded navy, and the same increase of
       pay, as to the army.
   13. Abolition of the commutation tax.
   14. Plan of a progressive tax, operating to extirpate the unjust and
       unnatural law of primogeniture, and the vicious influence of the
       aristocratical system.*[39]

   There yet remains, as already stated, one million of surplus taxes. Some
   part of this will be required for circumstances that do not immediately
   present themselves, and such part as shall not be wanted, will admit of a
   further reduction of taxes equal to that amount.

   Among the claims that justice requires to be made, the condition of the
   inferior revenue-officers will merit attention. It is a reproach to any
   government to waste such an immensity of revenue in sinecures and nominal
   and unnecessary places and officers, and not allow even a decent
   livelihood to those on whom the labour falls. The salary of the inferior
   officers of the revenue has stood at the petty pittance of less than fifty
   pounds a year for upwards of one hundred years. It ought to be seventy.
   About one hundred and twenty thousand pounds applied to this purpose, will
   put all those salaries in a decent condition.

   This was proposed to be done almost twenty years ago, but the
   treasury-board then in being, startled at it, as it might lead to similar
   expectations from the army and navy; and the event was, that the King, or
   somebody for him, applied to parliament to have his own salary raised an
   hundred thousand pounds a year, which being done, every thing else was
   laid aside.

   With respect to another class of men, the inferior clergy, I forbear to
   enlarge on their condition; but all partialities and prejudices for, or
   against, different modes and forms of religion aside, common justice will
   determine, whether there ought to be an income of twenty or thirty pounds
   a year to one man, and of ten thousand to another. I speak on this subject
   with the more freedom, because I am known not to be a Presbyterian; and
   therefore the cant cry of court sycophants, about church and meeting, kept
   up to amuse and bewilder the nation, cannot be raised against me.

   Ye simple men on both sides the question, do you not see through this
   courtly craft? If ye can be kept disputing and wrangling about church and
   meeting, ye just answer the purpose of every courtier, who lives the while
   on the spoils of the taxes, and laughs at your credulity. Every religion
   is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him
   to be bad.

   All the before-mentioned calculations suppose only sixteen millions and an
   half of taxes paid into the exchequer, after the expense of collection and
   drawbacks at the custom-house and excise-office are deducted; whereas the
   sum paid into the exchequer is very nearly, if not quite, seventeen
   millions. The taxes raised in Scotland and Ireland are expended in those
   countries, and therefore their savings will come out of their own taxes;
   but if any part be paid into the English exchequer, it might be remitted.
   This will not make one hundred thousand pounds a year difference.

   There now remains only the national debt to be considered. In the year
   1789, the interest, exclusive of the tontine, was L9,150,138. How much the
   capital has been reduced since that time the minister best knows. But
   after paying the interest, abolishing the tax on houses and windows, the
   commutation tax, and the poor-rates; and making all the provisions for the
   poor, for the education of children, the support of the aged, the
   disbanded part of the army and navy, and increasing the pay of the
   remainder, there will be a surplus of one million.

   The present scheme of paying off the national debt appears to me, speaking
   as an indifferent person, to be an ill-concerted, if not a fallacious job.
   The burthen of the national debt consists not in its being so many
   millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes
   collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continues the
   same, the burthen of the national debt is the same to all intents and
   purposes, be the capital more or less. The only knowledge which the public
   can have of the reduction of the debt, must be through the reduction of
   taxes for paying the interest. The debt, therefore, is not reduced one
   farthing to the public by all the millions that have been paid; and it
   would require more money now to purchase up the capital, than when the
   scheme began.

   Digressing for a moment at this point, to which I shall return again, I
   look back to the appointment of Mr. Pitt, as minister.

   I was then in America. The war was over; and though resentment had ceased,
   memory was still alive.

   When the news of the coalition arrived, though it was a matter of no
   concern to I felt it as a man. It had something in it which shocked, by
   publicly sporting with decency, if not with principle. It was impudence in
   Lord North; it was a want of firmness in Mr. Fox.

   Mr. Pitt was, at that time, what may be called a maiden character in
   politics. So far from being hackneyed, he appeared not to be initiated
   into the first mysteries of court intrigue. Everything was in his favour.
   Resentment against the coalition served as friendship to him, and his
   ignorance of vice was credited for virtue. With the return of peace,
   commerce and prosperity would rise of itself; yet even this increase was
   thrown to his account.

   When he came to the helm, the storm was over, and he had nothing to
   interrupt his course. It required even ingenuity to be wrong, and he
   succeeded. A little time showed him the same sort of man as his
   predecessors had been. Instead of profiting by those errors which had
   accumulated a burthen of taxes unparalleled in the world, he sought, I
   might almost say, he advertised for enemies, and provoked means to
   increase taxation. Aiming at something, he knew not what, he ransacked
   Europe and India for adventures, and abandoning the fair pretensions he
   began with, he became the knight-errant of modern times.

   It is unpleasant to see character throw itself away. It is more so to see
   one's-self deceived. Mr. Pitt had merited nothing, but he promised much.
   He gave symptoms of a mind superior to the meanness and corruption of
   courts. His apparent candour encouraged expectations; and the public
   confidence, stunned, wearied, and confounded by a chaos of parties,
   revived and attached itself to him. But mistaking, as he has done, the
   disgust of the nation against the coalition, for merit in himself, he has
   rushed into measures which a man less supported would not have presumed to
   act.

   All this seems to show that change of ministers amounts to nothing. One
   goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and
   extravagance are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect
   lies in the system. The foundation and the superstructure of the
   government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks into court
   government, and ever will.

   I return, as I promised, to the subject of the national debt, that
   offspring of the Dutch-Anglo revolution, and its handmaid the Hanover
   succession.

   But it is now too late to enquire how it began. Those to whom it is due
   have advanced the money; and whether it was well or ill spent, or
   pocketed, is not their crime. It is, however, easy to see, that as the
   nation proceeds in contemplating the nature and principles of government,
   and to understand taxes, and make comparisons between those of America,
   France, and England, it will be next to impossible to keep it in the same
   torpid state it has hitherto been. Some reform must, from the necessity of
   the case, soon begin. It is not whether these principles press with little
   or much force in the present moment. They are out. They are abroad in the
   world, and no force can stop them. Like a secret told, they are beyond
   recall; and he must be blind indeed that does not see that a change is
   already beginning.

   Nine millions of dead taxes is a serious thing; and this not only for bad,
   but in a great measure for foreign government. By putting the power of
   making war into the hands of the foreigners who came for what they could
   get, little else was to be expected than what has happened.

   Reasons are already advanced in this work, showing that whatever the
   reforms in the taxes may be, they ought to be made in the current expenses
   of government, and not in the part applied to the interest of the national
   debt. By remitting the taxes of the poor, they will be totally relieved,
   and all discontent will be taken away; and by striking off such of the
   taxes as are already mentioned, the nation will more than recover the
   whole expense of the mad American war.

   There will then remain only the national debt as a subject of discontent;
   and in order to remove, or rather to prevent this, it would be good policy
   in the stockholders themselves to consider it as property, subject like
   all other property, to bear some portion of the taxes. It would give to it
   both popularity and security, and as a great part of its present
   inconvenience is balanced by the capital which it keeps alive, a measure
   of this kind would so far add to that balance as to silence objections.

   This may be done by such gradual means as to accomplish all that is
   necessary with the greatest ease and convenience.

   Instead of taxing the capital, the best method would be to tax the
   interest by some progressive ratio, and to lessen the public taxes in the
   same proportion as the interest diminished.

   Suppose the interest was taxed one halfpenny in the pound the first year,
   a penny more the second, and to proceed by a certain ratio to be
   determined upon, always less than any other tax upon property. Such a tax
   would be subtracted from the interest at the time of payment, without any
   expense of collection.

   One halfpenny in the pound would lessen the interest and consequently the
   taxes, twenty thousand pounds. The tax on wagons amounts to this sum, and
   this tax might be taken off the first year. The second year the tax on
   female servants, or some other of the like amount might also be taken off,
   and by proceeding in this manner, always applying the tax raised from the
   property of the debt toward its extinction, and not carry it to the
   current services, it would liberate itself.

   The stockholders, notwithstanding this tax, would pay less taxes than they
   do now. What they would save by the extinction of the poor-rates, and the
   tax on houses and windows, and the commutation tax, would be considerably
   greater than what this tax, slow, but certain in its operation, amounts
   to.

   It appears to me to be prudence to look out for measures that may apply
   under any circumstances that may approach. There is, at this moment, a
   crisis in the affairs of Europe that requires it. Preparation now is
   wisdom. If taxation be once let loose, it will be difficult to re-instate
   it; neither would the relief be so effectual, as if it proceeded by some
   certain and gradual reduction.

   The fraud, hypocrisy, and imposition of governments, are now beginning to
   be too well understood to promise them any long career. The farce of
   monarchy and aristocracy, in all countries, is following that of chivalry,
   and Mr. Burke is dressing aristocracy, in all countries, is following that
   of chivalry, and Mr. Burke is dressing for the funeral. Let it then pass
   quietly to the tomb of all other follies, and the mourners be comforted.

   The time is not very distant when England will laugh at itself for sending
   to Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick for men, at the expense of a
   million a year, who understood neither her laws, her language, nor her
   interest, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the
   office of a parish constable. If government could be trusted to such
   hands, it must be some easy and simple thing indeed, and materials fit for
   all the purposes may be found in every town and village in England.

   When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy;
   neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are
   empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the
   taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am
   the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that
   country boast its constitution and its government.

   Within the space of a few years we have seen two revolutions, those of
   America and France. In the former, the contest was long, and the conflict
   severe; in the latter, the nation acted with such a consolidated impulse,
   that having no foreign enemy to contend with, the revolution was complete
   in power the moment it appeared. From both those instances it is evident,
   that the greatest forces that can be brought into the field of
   revolutions, are reason and common interest. Where these can have the
   opportunity of acting, opposition dies with fear, or crumbles away by
   conviction. It is a great standing which they have now universally
   obtained; and we may hereafter hope to see revolutions, or changes in
   governments, produced with the same quiet operation by which any measure,
   determinable by reason and discussion, is accomplished.

   When a nation changes its opinion and habits of thinking, it is no longer
   to be governed as before; but it would not only be wrong, but bad policy,
   to attempt by force what ought to be accomplished by reason. Rebellion
   consists in forcibly opposing the general will of a nation, whether by a
   party or by a government. There ought, therefore, to be in every nation a
   method of occasionally ascertaining the state of public opinion with
   respect to government. On this point the old government of France was
   superior to the present government of England, because, on extraordinary
   occasions, recourse could be had what was then called the States General.
   But in England there are no such occasional bodies; and as to those who
   are now called Representatives, a great part of them are mere machines of
   the court, placemen, and dependants.

   I presume, that though all the people of England pay taxes, not an
   hundredth part of them are electors, and the members of one of the houses
   of parliament represent nobody but themselves. There is, therefore, no
   power but the voluntary will of the people that has a right to act in any
   matter respecting a general reform; and by the same right that two persons
   can confer on such a subject, a thousand may. The object, in all such
   preliminary proceedings, is to find out what the general sense of a nation
   is, and to be governed by it. If it prefer a bad or defective government
   to a reform or choose to pay ten times more taxes than there is any
   occasion for, it has a right so to do; and so long as the majority do not
   impose conditions on the minority, different from what they impose upon
   themselves, though there may be much error, there is no injustice. Neither
   will the error continue long. Reason and discussion will soon bring things
   right, however wrong they may begin. By such a process no tumult is to be
   apprehended. The poor, in all countries, are naturally both peaceable and
   grateful in all reforms in which their interest and happiness is included.
   It is only by neglecting and rejecting them that they become tumultuous.

   The objects that now press on the public attention are, the French
   revolution, and the prospect of a general revolution in governments. Of
   all nations in Europe there is none so much interested in the French
   revolution as England. Enemies for ages, and that at a vast expense, and
   without any national object, the opportunity now presents itself of
   amicably closing the scene, and joining their efforts to reform the rest
   of Europe. By doing this they will not only prevent the further effusion
   of blood, and increase of taxes, but be in a condition of getting rid of a
   considerable part of their present burthens, as has been already stated.
   Long experience however has shown, that reforms of this kind are not those
   which old governments wish to promote, and therefore it is to nations, and
   not to such governments, that these matters present themselves.

   In the preceding part of this work, I have spoken of an alliance between
   England, France, and America, for purposes that were to be afterwards
   mentioned. Though I have no direct authority on the part of America, I
   have good reason to conclude, that she is disposed to enter into a
   consideration of such a measure, provided, that the governments with which
   she might ally, acted as national governments, and not as courts enveloped
   in intrigue and mystery. That France as a nation, and a national
   government, would prefer an alliance with England, is a matter of
   certainty. Nations, like individuals, who have long been enemies, without
   knowing each other, or knowing why, become the better friends when they
   discover the errors and impositions under which they had acted.

   Admitting, therefore, the probability of such a connection, I will state
   some matters by which such an alliance, together with that of Holland,
   might render service, not only to the parties immediately concerned, but
   to all Europe.

   It is, I think, certain, that if the fleets of England, France, and
   Holland were confederated, they could propose, with effect, a limitation
   to, and a general dismantling of, all the navies in Europe, to a certain
   proportion to be agreed upon.

   First, That no new ship of war shall be built by any power in Europe,
   themselves included.

   Second, That all the navies now in existence shall be put back, suppose to
   one-tenth of their present force. This will save to France and England, at
   least two millions sterling annually to each, and their relative force be
   in the same proportion as it is now. If men will permit themselves to
   think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more
   ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at
   the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling
   them into the ocean, to try which can sink each other fastest. Peace,
   which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage, than any
   victory with all its expense. But this, though it best answers the purpose
   of nations, does not that of court governments, whose habited policy is
   pretence for taxation, places, and offices.

   It is, I think, also certain, that the above confederated powers, together
   with that of the United States of America, can propose with effect, to
   Spain, the independence of South America, and the opening those countries
   of immense extent and wealth to the general commerce of the world, as
   North America now is.

   With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when
   it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create
   itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin,
   desolation, and misery. The horrid scene that is now acting by the English
   government in the East-Indies, is fit only to be told of Goths and
   Vandals, who, destitute of principle, robbed and tortured the world they
   were incapable of enjoying.

   The opening of South America would produce an immense field of commerce,
   and a ready money market for manufactures, which the eastern world does
   not. The East is already a country full of manufactures, the importation
   of which is not only an injury to the manufactures of England, but a drain
   upon its specie. The balance against England by this trade is regularly
   upwards of half a million annually sent out in the East-India ships in
   silver; and this is the reason, together with German intrigue, and German
   subsidies, that there is so little silver in England.

   But any war is harvest to such governments, however ruinous it may be to a
   nation. It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent people
   from looking into the defects and abuses of government. It is the lo here!
   and the lo there! that amuses and cheats the multitude.

   Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all
   Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France. By
   the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by
   the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism
   and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite
   expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German
   and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.
   The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and
   the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new
   world.

   When all the governments of Europe shall be established on the
   representative system, nations will become acquainted, and the animosities
   and prejudices fomented by the intrigue and artifice of courts, will
   cease. The oppressed soldier will become a freeman; and the tortured
   sailor, no longer dragged through the streets like a felon, will pursue
   his mercantile voyage in safety. It would be better that nations should
   continue the pay of their soldiers during their lives, and give them their
   discharge and restore them to freedom and their friends, and cease
   recruiting, than retain such multitudes at the same expense, in a
   condition useless to society and to themselves. As soldiers have hitherto
   been treated in most countries, they might be said to be without a friend.
   Shunned by the citizen on an apprehension of their being enemies to
   liberty, and too often insulted by those who commanded them, their
   condition was a double oppression. But where genuine principles of liberty
   pervade a people, every thing is restored to order; and the soldier
   civilly treated, returns the civility.

   In contemplating revolutions, it is easy to perceive that they may arise
   from two distinct causes; the one, to avoid or get rid of some great
   calamity; the other, to obtain some great and positive good; and the two
   may be distinguished by the names of active and passive revolutions. In
   those which proceed from the former cause, the temper becomes incensed and
   soured; and the redress, obtained by danger, is too often sullied by
   revenge. But in those which proceed from the latter, the heart, rather
   animated than agitated, enters serenely upon the subject. Reason and
   discussion, persuasion and conviction, become the weapons in the contest,
   and it is only when those are attempted to be suppressed that recourse is
   had to violence. When men unite in agreeing that a thing is good, could it
   be obtained, such for instance as relief from a burden of taxes and the
   extinction of corruption, the object is more than half accomplished. What
   they approve as the end, they will promote in the means.

   Will any man say, in the present excess of taxation, falling so heavily on
   the poor, that a remission of five pounds annually of taxes to one hundred
   and four thousand poor families is not a good thing? Will he say that a
   remission of seven pounds annually to one hundred thousand other poor
   families- of eight pounds annually to another hundred thousand poor
   families, and of ten pounds annually to fifty thousand poor and widowed
   families, are not good things? And, to proceed a step further in this
   climax, will he say that to provide against the misfortunes to which all
   human life is subject, by securing six pounds annually for all poor,
   distressed, and reduced persons of the age of fifty and until sixty, and
   of ten pounds annually after sixty, is not a good thing?

   Will he say that an abolition of two millions of poor-rates to the
   house-keepers, and of the whole of the house and window-light tax and of
   the commutation tax is not a good thing? Or will he say that to abolish
   corruption is a bad thing?

   If, therefore, the good to be obtained be worthy of a passive, rational,
   and costless revolution, it would be bad policy to prefer waiting for a
   calamity that should force a violent one. I have no idea, considering the
   reforms which are now passing and spreading throughout Europe, that
   England will permit herself to be the last; and where the occasion and the
   opportunity quietly offer, it is better than to wait for a turbulent
   necessity. It may be considered as an honour to the animal faculties of
   man to obtain redress by courage and danger, but it is far greater honour
   to the rational faculties to accomplish the same object by reason,
   accommodation, and general consent.*[40]

   As reforms, or revolutions, call them which you please, extend themselves
   among nations, those nations will form connections and conventions, and
   when a few are thus confederated, the progress will be rapid, till
   despotism and corrupt government be totally expelled, at least out of two
   quarters of the world, Europe and America. The Algerine piracy may then be
   commanded to cease, for it is only by the malicious policy of old
   governments, against each other, that it exists.

   Throughout this work, various and numerous as the subjects are, which I
   have taken up and investigated, there is only a single paragraph upon
   religion, viz. "that every religion is good that teaches man to be good."

   I have carefully avoided to enlarge upon the subject, because I am
   inclined to believe that what is called the present ministry, wish to see
   contentions about religion kept up, to prevent the nation turning its
   attention to subjects of government. It is as if they were to say, "Look
   that way, or any way, but this."

   But as religion is very improperly made a political machine, and the
   reality of it is thereby destroyed, I will conclude this work with stating
   in what light religion appears to me.

   If we suppose a large family of children, who, on any particular day, or
   particular circumstance, made it a custom to present to their parents some
   token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a
   different offering, and most probably in a different manner. Some would
   pay their congratulations in themes of verse and prose, by some little
   devices, as their genius dictated, or according to what they thought would
   please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any of those
   things, would ramble into the garden, or the field, and gather what it
   thought the prettiest flower it could find, though, perhaps, it might be
   but a simple weed. The parent would be more gratified by such a variety,
   than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made
   exactly the same offering. This would have the cold appearance of
   contrivance, or the harsh one of control. But of all unwelcome things,
   nothing could more afflict the parent than to know, that the whole of them
   had afterwards gotten together by the ears, boys and girls, fighting,
   scratching, reviling, and abusing each other about which was the best or
   the worst present.

   Why may we not suppose, that the great Father of all is pleased with
   variety of devotion; and that the greatest offence we can act, is that by
   which we seek to torment and render each other miserable? For my own part,
   I am fully satisfied that what I am now doing, with an endeavour to
   conciliate mankind, to render their condition happy, to unite nations that
   have hitherto been enemies, and to extirpate the horrid practice of war,
   and break the chains of slavery and oppression is acceptable in his sight,
   and being the best service I can perform, I act it cheerfully.

   I do not believe that any two men, on what are called doctrinal points,
   think alike who think at all. It is only those who have not thought that
   appear to agree. It is in this case as with what is called the British
   constitution. It has been taken for granted to be good, and encomiums have
   supplied the place of proof. But when the nation comes to examine into its
   principles and the abuses it admits, it will be found to have more defects
   than I have pointed out in this work and the former.

   As to what are called national religions, we may, with as much propriety,
   talk of national Gods. It is either political craft or the remains of the
   Pagan system, when every nation had its separate and particular deity.
   Among all the writers of the English church clergy, who have treated on
   the general subject of religion, the present Bishop of Llandaff has not
   been excelled, and it is with much pleasure that I take this opportunity
   of expressing this token of respect.

   I have now gone through the whole of the subject, at least, as far as it
   appears to me at present. It has been my intention for the five years I
   have been in Europe, to offer an address to the people of England on the
   subject of government, if the opportunity presented itself before I
   returned to America. Mr. Burke has thrown it in my way, and I thank him.
   On a certain occasion, three years ago, I pressed him to propose a
   national convention, to be fairly elected, for the purpose of taking the
   state of the nation into consideration; but I found, that however strongly
   the parliamentary current was then setting against the party he acted
   with, their policy was to keep every thing within that field of
   corruption, and trust to accidents. Long experience had shown that
   parliaments would follow any change of ministers, and on this they rested
   their hopes and their expectations.

   Formerly, when divisions arose respecting governments, recourse was had to
   the sword, and a civil war ensued. That savage custom is exploded by the
   new system, and reference is had to national conventions. Discussion and
   the general will arbitrates the question, and to this, private opinion
   yields with a good grace, and order is preserved uninterrupted.

   Some gentlemen have affected to call the principles upon which this work
   and the former part of Rights of Man are founded, "a new-fangled
   doctrine." The question is not whether those principles are new or old,
   but whether they are right or wrong. Suppose the former, I will show their
   effect by a figure easily understood.

   It is now towards the middle of February. Were I to take a turn into the
   country, the trees would present a leafless, wintery appearance. As people
   are apt to pluck twigs as they walk along, I perhaps might do the same,
   and by chance might observe, that a single bud on that twig had begun to
   swell. I should reason very unnaturally, or rather not reason at all, to
   suppose this was the only bud in England which had this appearance.
   Instead of deciding thus, I should instantly conclude, that the same
   appearance was beginning, or about to begin, every where; and though the
   vegetable sleep will continue longer on some trees and plants than on
   others, and though some of them may not blossom for two or three years,
   all will be in leaf in the summer, except those which are rotten. What
   pace the political summer may keep with the natural, no human foresight
   can determine. It is, however, not difficult to perceive that the spring
   is begun.- Thus wishing, as I sincerely do, freedom and happiness to all
   nations, I close the second part.