laws robbed the creditor, regrating and anti-monopoly acts ruined the trader. When the weak state courts, true to the principles of justice, sought to protect the minority, the legislatures suspended their sitting, or turned the judges out of office. The general government, called into existence by the articles of confederation, which had been modeled on the Batavian and Helvetic constitutions,[1] was but a legislative dependent of the state legislatures, with scarcely a shadow of executive or judicial power, and was therefore equally impotent to protect. For the moment a faction of agriculturists reigned supreme, and to the honest and thoughtful, democracy seemed to be digging its own grave, through the apparent inability of the majority to control itself.
Fortunately injustice to, and robbery of, fellow-citizens, eventually injure the wrong-doer as well as the wronged. A time came when the claims of the creditors had been liquidated and the goods of the traders had been confiscated, and the former refused further loans and the latter laid in no new stocks. The capitalist and the merchant were alike ruined or driven from business, and it was the landholder, unable to sell, to buy, or to borrow, who was the eventual sufferer. Such was his plight that he could not in many cases sell even enough of his products to get the money to pay his annual taxes,[2] and this condition very quickly brought home to his own instruments of wrong-doing, the legislatures, the evils they had tried to fasten on the minority. Taxes were unpaid, and, except where the conditions were factitious, the state treasuries became empty. Finally, in an attempt to collect the taxes in Massachusetts, a formidable revolt of tax-payers against the state government was precipitated. Everywhere the state legislatures had become objects of contempt in just so far as they had
- ↑ Inaugural address of John Adams, 1797.
- ↑ "What numbers of fine cattle have returned from this city [New York] to the country for want of buyers? What great quantities of salted and other provisions still lie useless in the stores? To how much below the former price is our corn and wheat and flour and lumber rapidly falling?"—John Jay, in "Pamphlets on the Constitution," 73.
