Our land-holders, too, like theirs,
retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs,
but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in
foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and
the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson
that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private
extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A
departure from principle in one instance, becomes a precedent for a
second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society
is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities
left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the _bellum
omnium in omnia_, which some philosophers observing to be so general
in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive
state of man. And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt.
Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem
them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They
ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and
suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I
belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country.
It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present;
and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of
book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise
from the dead.
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