I shall here only consider it as a transfer of property. On the policy
of that transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to
the immediate support of the producer. This surplus forms the income of
the landed capitalist. It will be spent by a proprietor who does not
labor. But this idleness is itself the spring of labor, this repose the
spur to industry. The only concern for the state is, that the capital
taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry
from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least
possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it and to those of
the people to whom it is returned.
In all the views of receipt, expenditure, 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.
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