tional obligations, which ought to restrain the legislature in its dealings with property. These, however, are objections, relevant not to the question of the competency of the agent, but to that of the propriety of the act. It is with the former inquiry alone that we are at present dealing.

38. So far, then, it has been argued, that there is no consideration flowing out of the nature of property which, in limine, precludes the question whether governors may rightfully apply the funds of the State in the promotion of a national religion; and that, if there be a disqualification of this kind, it must have its origin in some special provision inserted in the contract of government for a particular State. It follows that this can have no application to a country which has no such provision in its contract, much less to one which has no such contract. Both those, therefore, who regard the monarchy of England as paternal, and those who hold it to be founded more properly on an original covenant, should agree that there is no bar of this kind in the case with which we are more immediately concerned.

39. Now, I would submit, that the funds in the State treasury, so far as they are property at all, are the property of the nation; of course it is meant before they have been specifically appropriated. But the nation is not an aggregation of individuals; it is a collective body, having an organ to act on its behalf, and empowered and bound to apply these funds for its benefit. To say they are the property of the nation is one thing; to say they are the property

of the tax-payers is another, and widely different. And this, although the sum of the individual taxpayers may nearly compose the entire nation. Why, then, this distinction? Firstly, because there is a concealed fallacy in the phrase. It is intended to support the claim of individuals to protest against a particular appropriation of what they call their money. But, in truth, as individuals, in no sense, or shadow of a sense, have they any property in the funds of the State. An individual not only does not possess, cannot appropriate, cannot alienate them; but further, he has no claim to have them employed for his individual advantage, otherwise than as he may conform to the conditions of the laws, of which conditions the State, and not he, is the judge. Therefore, for this reason do I object to the proposition, that the funds of the State are the property of the payers of taxes; because it really contemplates them as individuals while seeming to carry all the rights of the nation, and that, regarded in that capacity, they have really nothing approaching to the nature of a property in those funds.

40. In admitting them to be the property of the nation, I may afford to regard the term in its full unrestricted sense, as carrying with it the power of disposal, and not merely the right to receive the use and benefit to arise out of them; for it will still remain true, and decisive against the objection, that the property of the nation is to be administered by that organ of the nation, which has given to it its determinate character as property, and which has

authority and discretion to decide upon the mode of its application, with no other appeal than such as the constitution has given. It in no way follows from this admission, that the popular will is to be consulted with respect to the appropriation of public funds, further than as that will is expressed through the most authentic medium which the constitution has provided. The tax-payers are entitled to such application of the funds of the nation, not as taxpayers but as subjects. For, under an altered system of revenue, it might happen that the majority of them should pay no taxes whatever, and yet their equitable rights would remain wholly unimpaired.

41. And I believe the common notion, which forms the real groundwork of the proposition I have quoted above from Dr. Wardlaw, is not a formal claim of property in the State funds, but this, that there is an injustice on the part of the legislature in such an employment of the monies obtained from individuals, as that which is warranted by the theory of а State religion. That it is hard and unfair to take from the private person what he has industriously earned or lawfully inherited, and to apply it in a manner perhaps independent of, perhaps even opposed to, his positive will.

42. When this plea is advanced, we are entitled to ask the question-if this money was earned by industry, how was that industry made available? How is the exchange of commodities facilitated and adjusted, how is the market of industry kept open, how

are the fruits of industry secured against violence and fraud, but by public law? If this money was inherited, how is the right of inheritance framed and guaranteed, and its regular courses realised, except by the same public law? If, therefore, the justice or injustice of the levying of money for the support of religion be placed simply upon this issue, whether the individual has not contributed greater advantages to society at large than he has received from it, and whether, therefore, there can be any residuary balance in favour of the nation, entitling it through its organ to demand and exact somewhat more of the individual, the answer is plain. I admit, indeed, that the tendency of our own economical condition, the rapid growth of commercial and manufacturing, and the relative decrease of agricultural occupations, with the collateral circumstances, must be to diminish the debt of the individual to the great family into which he is born, and to make him regard society, less and less as a mother, more and more as a mistress, or even as a foe. Yet still it remains true, that in every tolerably, nay, every however wretchedly regulated State, the individual is much more a debtor than a creditor to that social constitution in which he has been by nature thrown, and without which he must have been satisfied with ministering to the most imperious necessities of his animal life, and must have held that life itself on a tenure liable at all times to determine through violence or want. The worst of all actual or, humanly speaking, possible govern

ments appears decidedly preferable to anarchy; and in the same proportions individuals lie under some positive debt to the community.

43. The true condition, under which the State is morally bound to administer the property of the nation, is this: that its disposal be such as, times and circumstances fully considered, is, according to the judgment and conscience of the State, conducive, in the highest attainable degree, to the best interests of the nation. Nothing can be more absurd than the idea, that a right of property remains in individuals after the money has been legally demanded by the State. Nothing can be more untenable than an argument against the competency of the State to demand by law payments for religious purposes, from any notion that it is already a debtor to the individual, and so may not ask anything more from him or, that it is incompatible with the idea of property. Whatever is for the best interests of the nation as such, is matter for the consideration of the State as such, so far as it is intrinsically and extrinsically qualified. As a State it is, according to the idea of government, competent to entertain every question which has relation to the interests of the nation as such,* and to apply and define its own agency there

upon.

;

44. It may, however, appear to some as if this were a stringent and arbitrary doctrine, alien to the spirit of free institutions; but a little consideration

*

VOL. I.

Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy, b. vi. ch. x.

૨