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    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.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/7/