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SECTION THE FIFTH.
BANKING.
I shall now proceed to the examination of banking, in the face of a prepossession, which has seized, like a panick, upon the publick mind. If it is a limb of the aristocracy of the third age, it cannot be attached to the body of our policy without some dismemberment to make room for it. We know that banking made no part of this policy, state or continental, originally; and that now, like the tail of a Cape sheep, it constitutes its most conspicuous member.
Priests have at all times performed acts, which enrich themselves, and are by the laity believed to be miracles. Had it been your lot, reader, to address an audience composed of these priests and their laity, to prove that such acts were not miracles, what would you have considered as the most stubborn obstacles against success? You answer, the interest of one party and the superstition of the other. And jet neither this interest nor superstition, furnish fact or argument as to the truth or falsehood of these miracles, or the justice of the tax they inflict. Ought either then to suffocate inquiry and truth; and would you not pity the unhappy blindness or vice capable of fostering an errour so gross?
Reader, I only ask you not to become yourself this object of commiseration. Neither prejudice nor avarice will conduct you to truth. Refute the arguments which are refutable; but yield your conviction to those which you cannot refute.
Premising, that all the objections against debt stock or paper systems, apply with equal, and often with accumulated
