Experience
is with me, and, I believe, the best opinions also. To keep a
balance between the power of acquisition on the part of the subject
and the demands he is to answer on the part of the state is the
fundamental part of the skill of a true politician. The means of
acquisition are prior in time and in arrangement. Good order is the
foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire, the people,
without being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The
magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body
of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by
art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of
which they cannot partake. They must labor to obtain what by labor can
be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success
disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their
consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice. Of this
consolation, whoever deprives them deadens their industry and
strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. He that
does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor
and wretched, at the same time that by his wicked speculations he
exposes the fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of
fortune to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the
unprosperous.
Too many of the financiers by profession are apt to see nothing in
revenue but banks, and circulations, and annuities on lives, and
tontines, and perpetual rents, and all the small wares of the shop.
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