and interests, in manners and opinions, and the| inhabitants of which are not unreluctant to be employed one against the other. Hence, while we Americans leave our few soldiers to the states where they were levied, the kings of Europe will cautiously change the quarters of theirs, and send them into provinces as remote as possible. When they have ceased to have a home, they have ceased to have a country: for all affinities are destroyed by breaking the nearest. Thrones are constructed on the petrifaction of the human heart. Washington. Lawless ambition has no chance whatever of success where there are neither great standing armies nor great national debts. Where either of those exist, freedom must waste away and perish. We are as far from the one as from the other. Franklin, Dangers grow familiar and unsuspected slight causes may produce them, even names. Suppose a man calling another his subject, and having first received from him marks of deference, and relying on his good-temper and passiveness, and exerting by degrees more and more authority over him, and leaving him at last to the care and protection of his son or grandson. We are well acquainted with the designation; but we are ignorant how deeply it cuts into the metal. After a time a shrewd jurist will instruct the subject in his duties, and give him arguments and proofs out of the name itself. What so irrefragable! All the gravest nations have been republics, both in ancient times and in modern. I shall believe that a king is better than a republic, when I find that a single tooth in a head is better than a set, and that in its solitariness there is a warrant for its strength and soundness. Washington. Many have begun to predict our future greatness:* in fact, no nation is ever greater than at the time when it recovers its freedom from under one apparently more powerful. America will never have to make again such a struggle as she made in 1775, and never can make one so glorious. A wide territory does not constitute a great people, nor does enormous wealth, nor does excessive population. The Americans are at present as great a people as we can expect them to be in future. Can we hope that they will be more virtuous, more unanimous, more courageous, more patriotic? They may become more learned and more elegant in their manners: but these advantages are only to be purchased by paying down others equivalent. Franklin. All acquisitions, to be advantageous, must have some mart and vent. Elegance grows familiar with venality. Learning may perhaps be succeeded by a Church-Establishment; an institution perversive of those on which the government of America is constructed. Erudition (as we use the word) begins with societies, and ends with professions and orders. Priests and lawyers, the flies and wasps of ripe and ripening communities, may darken and disturb America. A few of these (we will allow) are necessary; many are, of all the curses that the world is subject to, the most pernicious. These guardians have been proved in every country the poisoners of their wards, Law and Religion. They never let us exist long together in an equable and genial temperature: it is either at fever heat or at zero. The Latin language, which answers so nearly all our demands upon it from its own resources, or, not having quite wherewithal, borrows for us a trifle from the Greek, neither can give us nor help us to find, directly or circuitously, a word for subject. Subditus, the term in use, is not Latin in that sense, whether of the golden, the silver, or the brazen age: it means substitute primarily, and then subdued or subjected. Yet people own themselves to be subjects who would be outrageous if you called them vassals; an ap-around home, and their distance from Europe, pellation quite as noble. Washington. The solid sense of our people, their speculative habits, their room for enterprise ensure to them, if not a long continuance of peace, exemption from such wars as can affect in a material degree their character or their pros perity. We might have continued the hostilities, until a part or even the whole of Canada had been ceded to us. The Congress has done, what, if my opinion had been asked, I should have urgently recommended. Let Canada be ours when she is cultivated and enriched; let not the fruit be gathered prematurely; indeed let it never be plucked; let it fall when our bosom can hold it. This must happen within the century to come for no nation is, or ever has been, so intolerably vexatious to its colonies, its dependencies, Poetry, closing her eyes, has sung until people slept over it, that liberty is never more perfect or more safe than under a mild monarch: history teaches us the contrary. Where princes are absolute, more tyranny is committed under the mild than under the austere for the latter are jealous of power and entrust it to few. The mild delegate it inconsiderately to many: and the same easiness of temper which allows them to do so, permits their ministers and those under them to abuse the trust with impunity. It has been said that in a democracy there are many despots, and that in a kingdom there can be one only. This is false in a republic the tyrannical temper creates a check to itself in the very person next it: but in * Of the Americans in late years Madame de Staël says, a monarchy all entrusted with power become There is a people which will one day be very great, placing tyrannical by a nod from above, whether the nod her fine impressive pen on the broad rude mark of the be of approbation or of drowsiness. Royalty not vulgar, who measure greatness by the standard of aggresonly is a monster of more heads, but also of more sion. America was never so great as on the day when she declared her independence, and never will be greater; claws, and sharper. although she will constitute two great empires, more It is amusing to find us treated as visionaries. powerful and more unassailable than any now existing. try is more fertile than Britain; the inhabitants are healthy, strong, courageous, faithful, patriotic, and quick of apprehension. No quality is wanting which constitutes the respectability of a state; yet, from centuries of misrule, they are in a condition more hopeless than any other nation or tribe upon the globe, civilized or savage. and its conquests, as the British. I have known | barbarous and wretched as the Irish. The counpersonally several Governors, many of them honest and sensible men, many of them of mild and easy character; but I never knew one, nor ever heard of any from older officers, who attempted to conciliate the affections, or systematically to promote the interests, of the governed. Liberality has been occasionally extended to them; the liberality of a master toward a slave, and only after grievous sufferings. Services have then been exacted, not hard perhaps in themselves, but in a manner to cancel all recollection and deaden all sense of kindness. The French and Spaniards act differently they extract advantage from their undisturbed possessions, appealing to the generosity of their children, and softening their commands by kind offices and constant attentions. Whereever a French regiment is quartered, there are balls and comedies; wherever an English, there are disturbances in the street, and duels. Give the Spaniard a bull-fight, and you may burn his father at the stake, commending him to the God of Mercy in a cassock painted with the flames of hell. The English (and we their descendants are most deserving of the name) require but justice; whatever comes as a favour comes as an affront. To what a pitch then must our indignation be excited, when we are not permitted even to pay that which is required of us, unless we present it with the left hand, or upon the nose, or from our knees amid the mire! The orators of the British parliament, while they are colouring this insolence and injustice, keep the understanding of the people at tongue's length. Franklin. In good truth then the separation is no narrow one. I have been present while some of them have thrown up the most chaffy stuff two hours together, and have never called for a glass of water. This is thought the summit of ability, and he who is capable of performing it, is deemed capable of ruling the east and west.* The rich families that govern this assembly, have made us independent; they have given us thirteen provinces, and they will people them all for us in less than fifty years. Religious and grave men, for none are graver or more religious than the beaten, are praising the loving-mercies of God, in loosening from their necks the mill-stone of America. What a blessing to throw aside such an extent of coast, which of itself would have required an immense navy for its defence! No one dreams that England, in confederacy with America, would have been so strong in sailors, in ports, in naval stores, as to have become (I do not say with good management, I say in spite of bad) not invincible only, but invulnerable. Washington. If she turns her attention to the defects of her administration in all its branches, she may recover not much less than she has lost. Look at the nations of Europe, and point out one, despotic or free, of which so large a portion is so * Pitt may be complimented on his oratory in the words wherewith Anacreon congratulates the tettinx, àrabs, ἀναιμ', άσαρκι. Franklin. There is only one direct way to bring them into order, and that appears so rough it never will be trodden. The chief misery arises from the rapacity of the gentry, as they are styled, and the nobility, who, to avoid the trouble of collecting their rents from many poor tenants, and the greater of hearing their complaints, have leased their properties to what are called middlemen. These harass their inferiors in the exact ratio of their industry, and drive them into desperation. Hence slovenliness and drunkenness ; for the appearance of ease and comfort is an allurement to avarice. To pacify and reclaim the people, leases to middle-men must be annulled: every cultivator must have a lease for life, and (at the option of his successor) valid for as many years afterward as will amount in the whole to twenty-one. The extent of ground should be proportionate to his family and his means. To underlet land should be punished by law as regrating. Washington. Authority would here be strongly exercised, not tyrannically, which never can be asserted of plans sanctioned by the representatives of a people, for the great and perpetual benefit of the many, to the small and transient inconvenience of the few. Franklin. Auxiliary to this reform should be one in church-livings. They should all embrace as nearly as possible the same number of communicants. Suppose three thousand souls under each cure: a fourth part would consist of the infirm, and of children not yet prepared for the reception of doctrine. The service, as formerly, should be shorter, and performed thrice each Sunday: so that all might in turn be present, and that great concourse would be avoided, which frequently is the prelude to licentiousness and brutality. Abolishing tithes, selling the property of the crown, of the church, and of corporations, I would establish a fund sufficient to allow each clergyman, in addition to his house, one hundred and forty pounds annually. Each would be remunerated, not for his profession, but for services done toward the state by his attention to the morals of his communicants. If the people pay forty pounds for taking up a felon, would they not willingly pay four times as much for reclaiming a dozen? Washington. I do not know: for we must never argue that men or their rulers are the likelier to do a thing because it is rational or useful. If ever the poorer clergy are rendered more comfortable, it will be only when the richer are afraid of losing a part of their usurped dominions. English and Irish bishops, who possess ten and twelve thousand a year, will be the last to relieve : the necessities of their brethren and their selfishness will not alienate from them those who are habituated to long abuses. The fine linen of popery sticks close to the skin and there is much of it in the wardrobe of the English church. On all subjects I can talk dispassionately, and perhaps the most so on that topic which renders the great body of mankind the most furious and insane. Never would I animadvert on the tenets of the Catholic or any other church, apart from civil polity. But I am suspicious, if not inquisitive, when I see questionable articles day after day smuggled in, and when I am pushed aside if I venture to read the direction or lift up the wrapping. Articles of faith are innocent in themselves: but upon articles of faith what incontrollable domination, what insupportable prerogatives, what insolent frauds, what incessant tyranny, have been asserted and enforced. Franklin. I am ready to be of that church, if you will tell me which it is, in which there are the fewest of them. Show me that a single pope in one country tells fewer lies and sits quieter than twenty in another, and he is the pope for my money, when I lay it out on such a commodity. The abuses of the clergy were first exposed by the clergy, the lower assailing the higher. If something more like equality, something more near moderation, had pervaded all, fewer sects would have arisen, and those fewer less acrimonious. Dogmas turn sour upon too full stomachs, and empty ones rattle against them. Envy, which the wolves and bears are without, and the generous dog alone seems by his proximity to have caught from us, Envy, accompanying Religion, swells amid her genuflexions to the episcopal canopy, at seeing so much wealth so ill distributed. The low cannot be leaders without a change nor without a party. Some unintelligible syllable is seized; and the vulgar are taught to believe that salvation rests upon it. Even this were little they are instructed that salvation may be yet perhaps insecure, unless they drag others to it by the throat, and quicken their paces at the dagger's point. . Popery first laid down this doctrine; the most abominable and monstrous of her tenets, and the only one that all establishments, splitting off from her, are unanimous in retaining. Washington. The reductions you propose would bring about another: they would remove the necessity of a standing army in that unfortunate country, and would enable the government to establish three companies for fisheries, the herring, the cod, and the whale, and to enrich her remote dominions with the superabundance of a discontented peasantry. The western part of Ireland in another century may derive as great advantages from her relative position with America, as the eastern from hers with the mercantile and manufacturing towns of Lancashire. The population is already too numerous, and is increasing, which of itself is the worst of curses, unless when high civilisation regulates it; and the superflux must be diverted by colonisation, or occupied on the seas by commerce. Manufactures tend to deteriorate the species, but begin by humanising it. Happy those countries which have occasion for little more of them than may supply the home consumption ! National debts are evils, not so much because they take away from useful and honest gains, as because they create superfluous and dishonest ones; and because, when carried as far as England would carry hers, they occasion half the children of the land to be cooped up in buildings which open into the brothel and the hospital. In assenting to you, I interrupted your propositions; pray go on. Franklin. I would permit no Englishman to hold in Ireland a place of trust or profit, whether in church or state. I would confer titles and offices on those Irish gentlemen who reside in the country; and surely they would in time become habituated to a regular and decorous mode of life. The landlord and clergyman might in the beginning lose something of current coin; but if you consider that their lives, houses, and effects would be safe, that provisions would be plentiful in proportion to the concessions they make, and that in no year would their rents and incomes fail, as they now do at least thirty in each century, you will find that their situation, like the situation of their inferiors, must be improved. Washington. Many will exclaim against the injustice of taking from one class alone a portion of its property as insurance-money. Franklin. Not from one alone: property should be protected at its own cost: this is the right and the object of governments. The insurance is two-fold; that of the private man and that of the community; the latter is the main consideration. I perceive nothing arbitrary, nothing novel, in its principle.* The King of England and Ireland, as head of the church, succeeds by consent of Parliament to the disposal of benefices. He surely can do in his own kingdom what the pope can do in another's, where ecclesiastical property (if any can be called so) is concerned. The religion of a state is established for the correction of its morals, and its morals are requisite to the maintenance of the laws. Religion then, in the view of a statesman, is only a thing that aids and assists the laws, removing from before them much of their painful duties, and lessening (if good and effectual) the number of their officers and executioners. that in political economy there is between them a close and intimate connection, and both alike are subject to regulations in them from the same authority. Where there is a state religion the salary of a clergyman should be as much subject *There is an argument which could not be attributed to Franklin, because it is derived from an authority to which he never appealed, and the words containing it are unlikely to have lain within the range of his reading. So "Le Pape peut revoquer la loi etablie par lui ou par predecesseur, et oster mesme sans occasion les effects procedens d'icelle, et le benefice valide à un chacun : car il a entiere disposition sur les benefices." Em. Sa. p. 528. reverse. For in proportion as they labour to extol it, in the same proportion do they oblige us to suppose them its most impudent and outrageous violators, or, at the least, ignorant of its spirit and incapable of its application. Otherwise how could this excellent form be the parent of deformity? How could the population, where the country is so fertile and the race so industrious, contain a larger number of indigent families, and those among the most laborious and the most virtuous, than any other upon earth? to the state as the stipend of a custom-house world, but in demonstrating, if I could, the officer and exciseman. If a government exerts the power of taxing one trade or profession, it does the same thing or more. Suppose it should levy a tax of a hundred pounds on every man who begins the business of an apothecary or lawyer, is not the grievance even heavier, as pressing on those whose gains are yet uncertain and to be derived from others, than it would be if bearing upon those whose emoluments are fixed, and proceed from the government which regulates and circumscribes them? But they have been accustomed, you will say, to the enjoyment of more. So much clear gain for them; and I hope they may have made a liberal and prudent use of the superfluity. Those who have done so, will possess minds ready to calculate justly their own lasting interests, and the interests of the community for whose benefit they have been appointed. If there is anything the existence of which produces great and general evil, and the abolition of which will produce great and general good, in perpetuity, the government is not only authorised by right, but bound by duty, to remove it. Compensation should be made to the middle-men for all losses; it should be made even to the worst; these losses may as easily be ascertained, as those occasioned to proprietors and tenants through whose lands we open a road or a canal. Washington. Methods, far short of what you indicate, will be adopted, and will fail. Constitutional lawyers will assent that Ireland be subject to martial law for thirty years in the century, and to little or none for the remainder, but will not assent that everything unlawful be unnecessary and unprovoked. In consequence of which, within the lifetime of some in existence we shall have two millions of Irishmen in America, reclaimed from their ferocity by assuaging their physical and moral wants, and addicted to industry by the undisturbed enjoyment of its reward. Experience seems to have given no sort of instruction to their rulers: they profit by nothing old, they venture on nothing new. Franklin. We are informed by the scientific in chemistry, that a diamond and a stick of charcoal on the hearth are essentially of the same materials. In like manner those among men who to the vulgar eye are the most dissimilar in externals, are nearly the same in mind and intellect; and their difference is the effect of accident and fortune, of position and combination. Those who, governing the political, influence in a high degree the moral world, can perform at once what Nature is myriads of years in accomplishing: they can convert the stick of charcoal into a diamond by the aliment and situation they allow to it. Our government will find its interest in doing so others will pursue their old occupation in reducing the diamond to its dark original, and exercise their divine right of keeping it unextracted. If I were a member of the British Ministry, I should think I acted wisely, not in attempting to prove that the constitution is the best in the Washington. If the constitution were what it is represented, its agents could not abuse it; and if its agents could not abuse it, America would not have been at this time separated from England; nor would Ireland have been condemned to a massacre once at furthest in two generations; nor would the British people be more heavily taxed in its comforts and its necessaries than the Algerines and Turks, when its industry is so much greater, and when its territory has not been occupied nor invaded nor endangered by an enemy. Franklin. The Persian despots never debased the souls of the nations they had conquered, and do not appear to have coveted their purses. Herodotus calls the taxation of the Ionian states a tranquillising and pacificatory measure. No portion of the globe was more advantageously situated for commerce than the Greek republics in Asia; no soil richer, no climate healthier, no people more industrious. Eolians, Ionians, and Dorians, together with Pamphylia, Lycia, the islands of Rhodes, Cos, Samos, Chios, and Sestos, on the whole exceeding four hundred miles by forty, were taxed unalterably at four hundred talents (about £105,000), by Darius, according to a scale submitted to their deputies by his father Artaxerxes. Italy in the time of Nero contained at the lowest computation twenty-six millions of inhabitants, and paid less in taxes than the City of London with its appurtenances. Appian states that Pompey imposed on the Tyrians and Cilicians a hundredth of their income. Hadrian was accused of great severity toward the Jews, in having somewhat augmented the rate which Vespasian had decreed, and which, according to Zonaras and Xiphilinus, was about sixteen pence on each. Strabo remarks that Egypt brought a revenue of about £180,000 to the father of Cleopatra, which was doubled by Augustus. When he was declared Imperator against M. Antonius, the Senate decreed a temporary property-tax of a twentieth. Plutarch in his Life of Pompey informs us that he levied on Asia £192,000. M. Antonius had exacted in advance at one time the tribute of ten years. Washington. The possibility of levying in a single year the ordinary taxes of ten, is a proof how extremely light were the impositions on the richest subjects of the Roman empire. Labouring under the enormous debt of £200,000,000, the English could not in any emergency pay the rate of three years anticipated. K : Franklin. The nations of Asia had recently paid more heavily for it was objected to them as a reproach, and as a cause for this exaction, that they had raised for Cassius and Brutus in the one preceding year what was now demanded for ten. Washington. So long as the English tolerate the absorption of their wealth under the patronage of their Peerage, wars and taxation will severely scourge them. Wars, the origin of taxation, are systematical in their periods, however little so in their conduct, and must recur about every twenty years, as a new generation springs up from the aristocracy, for which all the great civil employments, however multiplied, are insufficient, and which disdains all other professions than the military and the naval. But when this devourer hath exhausted and concentrated in itself nearly all the land and riches of the nation, then it will begin to discuss the question, whether it can gain most by suppressing the church establishment, or by maintaining it in its rankness. Franklin. May it not happen that the question be tried before a session of other jurors; and that the benches of the Lords Spiritual have nothing else upon them than the benches of the Lords Temporal with the legs uppermost? If state religions were abolished, the world would be quieter and better in England the national debt would be liquidated in a century, and in Ireland the public tranquillity would be established in a year. Among our own injuries on the part of England, this never bore upon us, namely, to pay for hearing what we knew or for what we disbelieved. If there existed no establishment in England, fear would be entertained of puritanism. Washington. Against what could puritanism act? It overthrew the established church in her state of inebriety: it kicked into the street her crosiers and mitres, and other such ensigns of barbarism and paganism and despotism. When it finds nothing to quarrel with out of doors, it will quarrel at home. Franklin. It grows strong by being kept in the cool, and bunged up by the ecclesiastical excise. Washington. Benjamin, I do not like to meddle with religions, nor indeed to speak about them. All of them appear to me inoffensive, excepting the Popish, which not only would have a hand in every man's pocket, but an ear on every man's pillow. Franklin. I know not whether the Irish are very fervent in their devotion to the Bishops of Rome. Probably they are unaware of some among the benefits they have heretofore received from them. Few, I dare say, have ever heard that their Holy Father, Hadrian the Fourth, solemnly gave his sanction to Henry the Second to invade and subjugate their country. This, I dare likewise say, would be loudly contradicted by the few who know it. Indeed I must correct my words before I go farther. Hadrian did not give his sanction; he sold it. A tax was to be paid the Holy See on every Irish family. So that the Holy See was as much interested as Henry himself that the con quest should be effectual and complete. The Holy Father chose rather a tax on families than a capitation: for, although many thousands of men would be exterminated, few whole families would. Washington. We may talk together in private of these historical facts; but if we mention them to people whose eyes might be opened by them, we shall render them in the same degree our enemies as we are their true friends. Franklin. I knew a certain man who would take the most nauseous medicine in health, because he had paid money for it at the apothecary's when he was ill; at the same time he would not eat a fresh salad at the next door. Things are valued by the places they come from. If a rea soner were to say what a Saint hath said about the Blessed Trinity, in most countries he would be called an infidel, and even in some of the most tolerant he would be subject to fine and imprisonment. Washington. How is that? Franklin. St. Augustine says, "We talk of Three Persons merely for the sake of talking." Washington. O the knave! Franklin. And scholars do say that the Latin expression is an ugly one: "Dictum est Tres Personæ, non ut aliquid diceretur, sed ne taceretur." Washington. Instead of sending to a rotten old city, the most profligate and the most venal on earth, for spiritual advice and counsel, which always comes to you in the form of a command, and enclosing an order to pay a pretty round sum to the bearer, could not every city and every hamlet find some worthy inhabitant, capable of giving his opinion upon those matters, if indeed there be any such, which the Disciples of Christ were unable or inattentive or indifferent to elucidate and explain? I see nothing worth a quarrel in them; and certainly there is nothing which the blessed Author of our religion would recom mend us to fight about. If there were no hierarchy in England and Ireland, the people of both countries would be brotherly and contented. They would mind their own business, and not the business of those who fare sumptuously on their credulity, and ride in rich housings on their fiery animosities. The revenues of ecclesiastics would overpay the just demands of a protecting and frugal government. Let the Protestant Church be no longer a hireling; and the Popish will drop away rag after rag, image after image, to the great emolument of the barber's shop. The poor people of that persuasion would not long be so foolish and besotted as to pay tithes where the heretic pays none. Inequality would shake their creed, extortion would open their eyes, and they would feel on that occasion what they now feel on another, that they were not, as they ought to be, in the same condition as the Protestant. parties will never be peaceable until the banners are thrown into the dust between them, and each tramples upon his own. Absurdities in worship would soon cease if nobody gained by them. Within half a century, the whole people would The |