Your lot, indeed!  Your lot assigned by Providence!  This is real blasphemy!  Just as if Providence, which sends the salt on shore all round our coast, had ordained that you should not have any of it unless you would pay the Boroughmongers fifteen shillings a bushel tax upon it!  But what a Providence must that be which would ordain that an Englishman should pay fifteen shillings tax on a bushel of English salt, while a Long Islander pays only two shillings and sixpence for a bushel of the same salt, after it is brought to America from England?  What an idea must we have of such a Providence as this?  Oh no, Jack; this is not the work of Providence.  It is the work of the Boroughmongers; the pretext about Providence has been invented to deceive and cheat you, and to perpetuate your slavery.

Well:  all is pawned then.  The land, the houses, the canals, the mines, and the labour are pawned for the payment of the interest of the Boroughmongers debt.  Your labour, mind, Jack, is pawned for the one-half of its worth.  But you will naturally ask, how is it that the nation, that everybody submits to this?  There’s your mistake, Jack.  It is not everybody that submits.  In the first place there are the Boroughmongers themselves and all their long tribe of relations, legitimate and spurious, who profit from the taxes, and who have the church livings, which they enjoy without giving the poor any part of their legal share of those livings.  Then there are all the officers of army and navy, and all the endless hosts of place-men and place-women, pensioned men and pensioned women, and all the hosts of tax-gatherers, who alone, these last I mean, swallow more than would be necessary to carry on the Government under a reformed Parliament.  But have you forgotten the lenders of the money which makes the debt?  These people live wholly upon the interest of the debt; and of course they approve of your labour, and the labour of every man being pawned.  The Boroughmongers have pawned your labour to them.  Therefore they like that your labour should be taxed.  They cannot be said to submit to the tyranny; they applaud it, and to their utmost they support it.

But you will say, still the mass of the people would, if they had a mind to bestir themselves, be too strong for all these.  Very true.  But you forget the army, Jack.  This is a great military force, armed with bayonets, bullets and cannon-balls, ready at all times and in all places to march or gallop to attack the people, if they attempt to eat sugar or salt without paying the tax.  There are forts, under the name of barracks, all over the kingdom, where armed men are kept in readiness for this purpose.  In Ireland they actually go in person to help to collect the taxes; and in England they are always ready to do the same.  Now, suppose, Jack, that a man who has a bit of land by the seaside, were to take up a little of the salt that Providence sends on shore.  He would be prosecuted.  He would resist the process.