Apart from this reason, others present themselves without disguise, by
which the debate between the exchequer and poor James becomes much
simplified. If the State says to him, "I take your crown to pay the
gendarme, who saves you the trouble of providing for your own personal
safety; for paving the street which you are passing through every day;
for paying the magistrate who causes your property and your liberty to
be respected; to maintain the soldier who maintains our
frontiers,"--James B., unless I am much mistaken, will pay for all this
without hesitation. But if the State were to say to him, "I take this
crown that I may give you a little prize in case you cultivate your
field well; or that I may teach your son something that you have no wish
that he should learn; or that the Minister may add another to his score
of dishes at dinner; I take it to build a cottage in Algeria, in which
case I must take another crown every year to keep an emigrant in it, and
another hundred to maintain a soldier to guard this emigrant, and
another crown to maintain a general to guard this soldier," &c., &c.,--I
think I hear poor James exclaim, "This system of law is very much like a
system of cheat!" The State foresees the objection, and what does it do?
It jumbles all things together, and brings forward just that provoking
reason which ought to have nothing whatever to do with the question. It
talks of the effect of this crown upon labour; it points to the cook and
purveyor of the Minister; it shows an emigrant, a soldier, and a
general, living upon the crown; it shows, in fact, _what is seen_, and
if James B. has not learned to take into the account _what is not seen_,
James B. will be duped. And this is why I want to do all I can to
impress it upon his mind, by repeating it over and over again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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