Another false principle at the root of our system (mark it well! for it is a most diabolical one) is, that laws may legitimately _make_ property for one set of people at the expense of another set, without the consent of the latter, and without giving them an equivalent. This principle lurks insidiously at the root of scores of different sorts of property, well known to exist in this country, and to be wholly and solely the offspring of class-legislation. The dividends payable on the National Debt are of this class of property; so are railway dividends; so are the dividends or revenues accruing from canals, docks, wharfs, fisheries, insurance offices, gas-companies, water-companies, mining-companies, and private companies of all sorts, which are chartered by private Acts of Parliament to do for the public what the public ought to be empowered to do for themselves. There is no subject upon which more gross and general ignorance prevails than upon this. Most people imagine that a man may as legitimately possess property of the kinds here alluded to, as he may possess a house, a horse, or a gross of Birmingham buttons. No delusion can be more ridiculous. Parliaments are chosen, and laws are designed, not to _make_ property for people, but to _protect_ it for those who have made it for themselves, or obtained it from those that _did_. If a man builds a house, or buys an ox, it is his rightful property irrespectively of Acts of Parliament. The law did not give him the house or the ox; neither has it a right to take it away, unless for a good and sufficient reason, and then only upon awarding adequate compensation. The same principle applies to every other legitimate description of property. All such legitimate descriptions of property are acquired or made by the owners themselves, and not by the law. The law only _protects_ such property; it does not _create_ or _make_ it. The State plan of borrowing money from its subjects on the perpetual-interest system is replete with folly and extravagance; unless it be admitted to be an artful scheme for robbing the wealth-producers, by taxing them with the payment of the interest of money which they never borrowed. An honest government would quickly set about paying this debt off, by offering life annuities to a certain number of stock-holders every year. A real State power ought never to _borrow_ money; it ought to _make_ it when required to cancel its obligations, receiving the same money back in the form of taxes, so as to prevent depreciation. The government practice of borrowing money on Exchequer bills is also absurdly wasteful; surely the credit of the State ought to be above that of any of its subjects!