On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    The argument of our second quotation relates less to the morality than to the political economy of the question . It is from the excellent * Catechism on the Corn Lawg / by Colonel Perronet Thompson . We quote from the seventeenth edition : — ' To rob the fundholder * of their interest , after having spent their capital , would , besides all the evils of breach of contract , have the hardship of an ex pott facto law , with the unique addition of being made in the teeth of the invitation of an existing law . The nation which should do it , would virtually declare itself incapable of

    contracting any national engagement , or performing any national act . A communit y must either acknowledge the possibility of being bonnd to-morrow by its act of to-day , or it must disband ; for if it declares its own incompetency , it will be treated with as a community by nobody . And for any thing that could be gained by such a proceeding , it might as well be proposed to gain by robbing all the individuals who had red hair . The individual robbers might gain by it , but the community could not gain ; fcecause the red-haired men are themselves part of the community . If the principal expended could be called back again , it would be a different case . But nobody can

    seriously believe , that by what has been called applying a sponge to the national debt , the community would be one shilling the richer ; or that by robbing one individual of five pounds per annum in order to put it into the pocket of another , the smallest progress would be made towards recovering the hundred which was spent ¦ thirty years ago . A man might as well try to repair the loss of a leg , by shifting the deficiency from one side to the other . If every individual was a fundholder in the same proportion that he is a tax-payer , it would be clear that the attempt was only shifting the leg . And it is the same when the case is as it is ; except that the fundholdsrs are the smaller party , and therefore might possibly be robbed . 1

    And this is not the fallacy of saying that a national debt is no evil . It is a very great evil ; and the worst thing about it is , that there is no getting rid of it . When a million is borrowed and spent , the evil is inflicted then ; and not by the shifting of the interest from one pocket to another afterwards . It is not the evil that is denied , but the possibility of getting rid of it by refusing to pay the interest . f magnitude of the evil or punishment is the same as if there had been inflicted a judicial necessity for throwing the amount of the interest annually into the Thames . For if the money had never been borrowed , the man who is now the fundholder would

    have had the principal in his pocket ; and the tax-payer would have saved the interest , which is the same thing to him as saving it from the Thames . But there is a special provision of Providence that when money has been thus raised , no possible dishonesty shall get rid of the burden . If the principal had been borrowed from Prester John , the community might possibly gain by cheating him of his interest . But since the interest is owed to a component part of the community , it is in the constitution of things , that the community , however inclined to the practice of larceny , can gain nothing by robbing itself . '

    To propose that the fundholders should contribute , in their separate character , to any imaginable object of national expenditure , is as unjust as to propose that certain of the creditors in a case of bankruptcy should suffer the average loss of the creditors in general , and have a sum struck out of their original account besides . The fundhoklers pay all taxes like other men , and to attack the amount of their claims upon the public besides , is precisely the operation supposed in the case of the bankruptcy . They make no objection to paying at the same rate as other people , to a property-tax , or to any other . What they object to , is being taxed and plundered too . i

    That people have been miserably cheated nobody doubts , but not by the fund holders . The fundholders have lost and not gained , in their character of fundholders ; and they have borne , and do b * ar , their bhare of the general sufieriug besides . How the suffering is to be diminished nobody seems able to tell . A gone-by Government indulged itself with an unjust war , of the expense of which it never paid a shilling , and has left the whole for us . The immediate defendants are out of reach ; they are where nobod y will go to fetch them . All thit is left for us in the way of recovery , is the possibility of recovering something from the interests in favour of which the fraud was enacted . And to this , if Corn Laws go on , it will come at last , though probably not till the necessity is such as to be eqoully convincing to all parties . ' 5 th March . Mr . Buckingham ' s Motion on Impressment . — ' It is not utonishing that in an age of barbarism men should commit barbarities .

    Untitled Article

    Impressment . 239

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 239, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/7/