Page:Armatafragment00ersk.djvu/179

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( 169 )

¬again your revenue stalks like a ghost across my path whichever way I turn; as otherwise you have a superior unbounded source of im- provement trodden under your very feet, and cast as refuse into your rivers, beyond all that chemistry is ever likely to discover. — You have salt, you say, in endless abundance, but your necessity turns it into money, even to forty times its value, instead of spreading it abroad for vari- ous uses, to rise up in property which no money could purchase. — After thus taxing to the very hone this life's blood of your people, why, to be consistent, do you not bind up by law their veins and arteries to prevent circulation? — Do you know what salt alone would do for you if it were not seized upon as revenue and clung to perhaps as a plank which you cannot quit in your distress? — I will speak of its other uses hereafter ; but can you be so ignorant as not to know, that by taking the tax upon it directly as money, you rob yourselves of fifty times its amount in the productions of your soil, in your fisheries and manufac- tures, ¬