8302. TAXATION, Oppressive English.—[continued].
If we run into such
debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat
and in our drink, in our necessaries and our
comforts, in our labors and our amusements,
for our callings and our creeds, as the people
of England are, our people, like them, must
come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-
four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to
the government for their debts and daily expenses;
and the sixteenth being insufficient to
afford us bread, we must live, as they now do,
on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to
think, no means of calling the mismanagers to
account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by
hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the
necks of our fellow-sufferers. * * * 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.—
To Samuel Kerchival. Washington ed. vii, 14.
Ford ed., x, 41.
(M.
1816)
