to the ground, and deprives them of the necessary means of subsistence. The principal of the debt which the nation has contracted, has been laid out in unproductive labour, in inflicting the mischiefs and miseries of war; and the interest is for the most part equally laid out in unproductive labour, in fomenting the pride and luxury of those who have made their fortunes by the war and taxes. In a word, the debt and taxes are a government machine, which diverts that portion of the wealth and industry of the people, which would otherwise be employed in supplying the wants and comforts (say) of a hundred persons, to pamper the extravagance, vices, and artificial appetites of a single individual; and so on in proportion to the whole country. Every tax laid on in this manner, unnerves the arm of industry, is wrung from the bowels of want, and breaks the spirit of a nation, lessens the number of hands which are employed in useful labour, to seduce them into artificial, dependent, and precarious modes of subsistence, while the rich themselves find their reward for the indulgence of their indolence and voluptuousness in "the gout, serpigo, and the rheum," so that "their proper loins do curse them." It has been said that the taxes taken from the people return to them again, like the vapours drawn up from the earth in clouds, that descend again in refreshing dews and fertilizing showers. On the contrary, they are like these dews and showers drawn off from the ground by artificial channels into private reservoirs and useless cisterns to stagnate and corrupt. The money which is paid in taxes is taken from the people; the labour for which it pays does not benefit the people. A tax which goes to pay for the feeding of a pair of curricle horses or favourite hunters, swallows up the subsistence of several poor families. We cannot for ourselves approve of the privations, of the hunger, cold, or nakedness, to which these poor families are exposed, to keep up the flesh and the spirit of the sleek and high-mettled inhabitants of the warm, well-littered stable, even though they were of the breed of Swift's Houyuhyms! But that is a different question. All that we mean to say here is, that the tax takes the corn out of the bellies
