The Stranger, Whose Money Buys Him Preference,
Considers Himself As Paying For All That He Has, And Is Indifferent
About The Laird's Honour Or Safety.
The commodiousness of money is
indeed great; but there are some advantages which money cannot buy,
and which therefore no wise man will by the love of money be
tempted to forego.
I have found in the hither parts of Scotland, men not defective in
judgment or general experience, who consider the Tacksman as a
useless burden of the ground, as a drone who lives upon the product
of an estate, without the right of property, or the merit of
labour, and who impoverishes at once the landlord and the tenant.
The land, say they, is let to the Tacksman at six-pence an acre,
and by him to the tenant at ten-pence. Let the owner be the
immediate landlord to all the tenants; if he sets the ground at
eight-pence, he will increase his revenue by a fourth part, and the
tenant's burthen will be diminished by a fifth.
Those who pursue this train of reasoning, seem not sufficiently to
inquire whither it will lead them, nor to know that it will equally
shew the propriety of suppressing all wholesale trade, of shutting
up the shops of every man who sells what he does not make, and of
extruding all whose agency and profit intervene between the
manufacturer and the consumer. They may, by stretching their
understandings a little wider, comprehend, that all those who by
undertaking large quantities of manufacture, and affording
employment to many labourers, make themselves considered as
benefactors to the publick, have only been robbing their workmen
with one hand, and their customers with the other.
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