of the one to put it into those of the other species. A tax which is laid on to pay for a dog-kennel or a stable, might have saved a whole village from going into ruin and decay: and the carriage that glitters like a meteor along the streets of the metropolis, often deprives the wretched inmate of the distant cottage of the chair he sits on, the table he eats on, the bed he lies on. A street lined with coaches and with beggars dying at the steps of the doors, gives a strong lesson to common sense and political foresight, if not to humanity. A nation cannot subsist on unproductive labour, on war and taxes, or be composed merely of parish and state paupers. All unproductive labour is supported by productive labour. All persons maintained by the taxes or employed by those who are maintained by them are a clog, a dead weight upon those who pay them, that consume the produce of the State, and add nothing to it—a dead carcase fastened to a living one, with this difference, that it still devours the food which it does not provide. Need we ask any farther, how war and taxes, sinecures and monopolies, by degrees, weaken, impoverish, and ruin a State? Or whether they can go on increasing for ever? There is an excess of inequality and oppression, of luxury and want, which no state can survive; as there is a point at which the palsied frame can no longer support itself, and at which the withered tree falls to the ground.
If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-account of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted—of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from ninetenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an
