The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
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,
volatilized; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous activity, and thereby
throws into the hands of the several managers, principal and
subordinate, Parisian and provincial, all the representative of money,
and perhaps a full tenth part of all the land in France, which has now
acquired the worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper
circulation, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They have
reversed the Latonian kindness to the landed property of Delos. They
have sent theirs to be blown about, like the light fragments of a wreck,
_oras et littora circum_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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