This is a digression introduced with no intention to favour a misapplication of public money, but to point out how far a reformation in this particular is a delicate operation.
A good physician never attacks a disease by violent remedies, when mild ones, with time, may be made to produce the same effect. Nothing can resemble an ingrained disease in a human body, more than an ingrained vicious habit in a state. The spirit of a nation is influenced, as has been said, by the administration of its government. So large a sum of misapplied money creates a political disease, which must be purged away by degrees; and new doors must be opened to receive those whose former method of subsistence is thereby intended to be cut off.
Let me next examine the consequence of a gradual and insensible reduction of taxes, relatively to trade, industry, and manufactures.
It would be both tedious and superfluous to trace the steps by which such an operation ought to be conducted. Let me suppose it compleat; but let it not be so very gradual as to blot out all remembrance of the age of taxes, and of their effects.
We have sufficiently analized the whole progress of circulation; we have shewn how it must constantly be in proportion to alienation, and how, when deficient, industry suffers a check. Even when peace is restored after an expensive war, we have shewn how circulation diminishes, from the abatement of public expences, how money stagnates, and how it is consolidated upon property of a more permanent nature.
Let us now apply these principles to the question before us. Let taxes be abolished ever so gradually, the circulation of the exchequer must cease in proportion; consequently, the whole alienation, and the whole industry which is the object of that alienation, must cease also. The money issued from thence at present, continues its progress from hand to hand, and all is found necessary for circulation, in this age of taxation, as we have called it. What a deal of industry is implied in the circulation of a sum equal to all the taxes! Let those who choose to calculate, state the following proportion, because I will not here interrupt my subject.
As the whole money of the country is to all the alienations performed by it, so is the sum of taxes to that part of alienation which will fall with them.
If a gradual diminution of taxes must have the effect of extinguishing so much industry, it will have the effect of starving the industrious who lived by it. But before they starve, the price of work must fall below the price of the narrowest subsistence: because the never failing foreign demand for subsistence, will keep it above the rate of their slender abilities, as long as any trade remains.
To imagine a foreign outlet for cheap manufactures, while the subsistence of workmen is at par with other nations, is against all principles; as it is against experience, to see a country without revenue, and without taxes, carrying on with success the operations of industry and foreign trade.
Compare, therefore, the situation of such manufacturers with those in the age of taxes. Compare those who would augment a supply far beyond all the demand for it, with those who are paying large taxes, and as regularly drawing them back, either upon the sale of their work, or in consequence of wages which enable them to be idle two or three days in a week.