iture, and personal employment, a
sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was
recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his
place. Before the inconveniences are incurred which _must_ attend all
violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought
to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated
property will be in a considerable degree more laborious, more virtuous,
more sober, less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the
gains of the laborer, or to consume on themselves a larger share than is
fit for the measure of an individual,--or that they should be qualified
to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode, so as to
answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the old possessors,
call those possessors bishops, or canons, or commendatory abbots, or
monks, or what you please. The monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them no
otherwise employed than by singing in the choir. They are as usefully
employed as those who neither sing nor say,--as usefully even as those
who sing upon the stage. They are as usefully employed as if they worked
from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly,
unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which
by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were
not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things, and to
impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by
the strangely directed labor of these unhappy people, I should be
infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable
industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic
quietude. Humanity, and perhaps policy, might better justify me in the
one than in the other. It is a subject on which I have often reflected,
and never reflected without feeling from it. I am sure that no
consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury
and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will
distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration
of such trades and employments in a well-regulated state. But for this
purpose of distribution, it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks
are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay loiterers.

When the advantages of the possession and of the project are on a par,
there is no motive for a change. But in the