produce a repulsion in the very outset. But allowing to the
scheme some coherence and some duration, it appears to me, that, if,
after a while, the confiscation should not be found sufficient to
support the paper coinage, (as I am morally certain it will not,) then,
instead of cementing, it will add infinitely to the dissociation,
distraction, and confusion of these confederate republics, both with
relation to each other and to the several parts within themselves. But
if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper currency,
the cement is gone with the circulation. In the mean time its binding
force will be very uncertain, and it will straiten or relax with every
variation in the credit of the paper.

One thing only is certain in this scheme, which is an effect seemingly
collateral, but direct, I have no doubt, in the minds of those who
conduct this business; that is, its effect in producing an _oligarchy_
in every one of the republics. A paper circulation, not founded on any
real money deposited or engaged for, amounting already to four-and-forty
millions of English money, and this currency by force substituted in the
place of the coin of the kingdom, becoming thereby the substance of its
revenue, as well as the medium of all its commercial and civil
intercourse, must put the whole of what power, authority, and influence
is left, in any form whatsoever it may assume, into the hands of the
managers and conductors of this circulation.

In England we feel the influence of the Bank, though it is only the
centre of a voluntary dealing. He knows little, indeed, of the influence
of money upon mankind, who does not see the force of the management of a
moneyed concern which is so much more extensive, and in its nature so
much more depending on the managers, than any of ours. But this is not
merely a money concern. There is another member in the system
inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the
means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for
sale, and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into
land and land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we
may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this
system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and
speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it.
By this kind of operation, that species of property becomes, as it were,
v