resource in confiscations of
any kind, or that any one description of citizens should be brought to
regard any of the others as their proper prey.[118] Nations are wading
deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public debts, which
at first were a security to governments, by interesting many in the
public tranquillity, are likely in their excess to become the means of
their subversion. If governments provide for these debts by heavy
impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the people. If they do
not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most
dangerous of all parties: I mean an extensive, discontented moneyed
interest, injured and not destroyed. The men who compose this interest
look for their security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of
government; in the second, to its power. If they find the old
governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not
to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes, they may seek new ones
that shall be possessed of more energy; and this energy will be
derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt of
justice. Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible
to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be
authorized. I am sure that the principles predominant in France extend
to very many persons, and descriptions of persons, in all countries, who
think their innoxious indolence their security. This kind of innocence
in proprietors may be argued into inutility; and inutility into an
unfitness for their estates. Many parts of Europe are in open disorder.
In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused
movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political
world. Already confederacies and correspondences of the most
extraordinary nature are forming in several countries.[119] In such a
state of things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard. In all
mutations (if mutations must be) the circumstance which will serve most
to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in
them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice
and tender of property.

But it will be argued, that this confiscation in France ought not to
alarm other nations. They say it is not made from wanton rapacity; that
it is a great measure of national policy, adopted to remove an
extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief.--It is with t