Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/632

of people, always necessary to be sacrificed to the legal opulence of a few. If knowledge and wealth are left to be distributed by industry, a beneficial excitement of effort, and a division sufficient to preserve a free government, are produced. By dividing lands, and creating stock of various kinds, drawing twenty millions a year from labour, a double operation to great extent is produced, of enriching and enlightening factitious interests, and of impoverishing the landed and working interests of the United States, both as to their minds and estates. This impoverishment of mind will endow the legal interests with the offices of government, convert representation into a mantle for fraud, and our government into an elective aristocracy. Had these twenty millions remained in the hands of agriculture and labour, they could have annually purchased knowledge to that amount; and the difference between this annual supply, and its transference by law from them to factitious interests, constitutes the pure principle of aristocracy. Common good, is the best principle for industry and majority; partial, for fraud and minority. If the first associates assign their wealth and knowledge to their natural enemies, as they have generally done, the war will terminate in the old way. By cutting up the landed interest into little farms, the interest of industry and majority will gradually lose that dissemination of moral talents, necessary to restrain the frauds of the whole family of legal, exclusive or aristocratical interests. The interest of the majority must perish, unless a sound mind is lodged somewhere within it. To cheat it of the share of knowledge by which it may maintain its rights, under pretence of making it all mind, would be like persuading the other members to cut off the head, and to depend for their future safety on a new contrivance for making all of them heads. Such is the reimbursement promised by a sytem of general education, for the removal of wealth and knowledge from agriculture and industry to legal interests. It resembles the device of sumptuary laws to hide the cause of luxury. Remove the cause, and the luxury ceases. Remove