deem itself, and the question of indemnifying the sufferers by the bankruptcy of Charles II., proved to be the first touchstone of British integrity. There was something so treacherous in the proceedings of Charles, who had closed the treasury when it was full of money, which had been advanced upon solemn pledges, that when the nation came to administer their affairs for themselves, they were compelled, by the recentness of the facts and their flagrant notoriety, for they had resounded through Europe, forthwith to hear the case of the creditors, who had lost their money by the bankruptcy of 1672. And it would naturally be imagined that in providing the redress, between their horror of the Stuarts and their joy and pride in their new liberties, they would have wiped out by a prompt and full payment this foul blot upon the British name. We are told of republican stinginess: let us see the incredible meanness of the aristocracy of England. The repudiated debt was originally short of fourteen hundred thousand pounds-a very trifle to a rich and great nation. It was twelve years after the revolution, before Parliament could find it in their conscience to do anything at all in this deplorable case; and then following and making deeper the bad footsteps of the profligate Charles, they began by repudiating their liability to return any portion of the money itself, or to do more than pay an interest upon it. They then enacted the authority to repudiate utterly one-half of the principal, whensoever themselves or their successors should pay the other half.-(Grellier on the National Debt, page 14.) They next actually and presently repudiated every farthing of all the arrears of interest, which being at eight and ten per cent., the rates at which Charles had borrowed the money twenty-nine years before, was between two and three times greater than the principal; and here they paused. After this precious operation performed upon the body of the debt, doubtless it will be supposed that my lords and gentlemen of the new government paid down the remnant in gold and silver. They have given in our day twenty millions to buy up negroes, and eat free sugar. What less could they do after cheating these poor white men out of more than two-thirds of their money, than pay down the other third handsomely? To this day they have not paid that money. They have paid an interest of three per cent., redeemable on the payment of half the principal, Parliament itself, in the same year of 1701, and at the same session of 12 William, of blessed memory, in which they voted to pay upon this unrepudiated fragmentary sum a THREE per cent. interest, borrowing for itself at a SIX AND-A-HALF per cent. interest.—(Grellier, page 50.) Thus they enacted to repudiate their liability to return any part of the money itself, to repudiate all the arrears of interest, to repudiate half the principal whenever they should be pleased to pay the other and more fortunate half, and to force down the interest to be paid to onethird of the rate at which the money had been borrowed, and less than half the rate at which themselves were borrowing at the time when, as a first essay of Parliamentary justice, they made this wonderful provision. In short, they paid about one-ninth of the obligation, or from two to three shillings in the pound, these rulers of a rich and powerful community, which cannot, we have Lord Palmerston's word for it, witness injustice "with tranquillity!" The annals of oligarchy would be ransacked in vain for an act of more contemptible, unnecessary fraud. Better a rough denial of all justice, than such beggarly cozening as this. When Henry VIII. incurred debts which he could not pay, and got Parliament to cancel them, he might flatter himself his repudiation was in some sort a necessity; he had fallen into the dirt and had to be helped out; but these revolutionary Judases seemed to wallow in treachery for the very love of it, for the payment of the whole debt and interest would not have been to the English

nation a flea-bite. When the French Directory guillotined their debt in 1797, theirs was an act of mercy and propriety compared with such heartless trafficking in honour and justice. First an alteration of the whole basis of the debt, and then so much to be deducted now, and so much more to be taken off one of these days-so much subtracted here and so much exacted there, and when at last the spirit of swap seemed to have done all its work, and nothing more remained for higgling or pinching to contrive, these counter-casters bethink themselves that the interest which King Charles had undertaken to pay to their poor bedevilled fellow-subjects was a hard bargain on his majesty, and so it would be a hard bargain on their oligarchal selves to pay the market-rate of the day, and low, miserable, traducers that they were, they reduced it 66 per cent.! Why, if Clifford himself-nay, if that good-natured strumpet, Nell Gwyn, at one of the inquests that used to be held upon public affairs in Charles' seraglios, had moved to offer an usance upon a fraction of a debt, by way of satisfaction of the whole, she would have blushed through her paint to think of screwing down that usance two-thirds. Yet this is what England did; this was the act of her political patriarchs, her men of 1688-this was English faith in what they call their best days; and this is the people, from whose pulpit of craft and fraudulent expediency, horse-jockeys, weather-cocks, and old women, would be-rate and lecture us! We would wager half our territory against an Orkney island, that there is not a club of American negroes that meets in any cellar in the country, where such measure of baseness could command three votes.

But it is not in the single case of the repudiation of a debt which even King Charles always professed his intention to pay off some day or other, profligate, Frenchman and Papist though he was, (to invent an English climax) that we discover the full extent of the reckless bad faith which immediately marked the conduct of the new-born English oligarchy. Parliament soon proceeded to systematize repudiation by the uncalled for introduction into their finance of the grand feature of funding. Formerly, nations had a treasure and not a debt, and the function of the officer called the treasurer, was to guard the king's money, and not to superintend his debts. As lately as towards the end of the last century, the late King of Prussia had a large treasure. Nations, like individuals, had their incomes and possessions, and like individuals, borrowed only occasionally to eke out a deficit of the usual revenue and taxes, or to aid some great undertaking, and then repaid what they borrowed before they borrowed again. But the Italians, always ahead of the rest of the world in ingenuity, imagined what is called the funding system, by which the prince borrowed, and never returned the money at all, but created instead, a fund for paying the interest upon it, granting to secure the lender a certain portion of the annual proceeds of his revenue; and this was called funding the debt, although the name funding has remained, long since the habit of pledging a particular fund, or doing more than to give a general promise to pay an interest upon the debt, has been abandoned. Thus, funding served to supply the sovereign with money, with a facility that was charming when opposed to the perils and difficulties of taxation. But nothing can be more obvious, than that perpetual borrowing and never paying, must come to an end at last, and that when the accumulated debt has acquired a certain magnitude, neither interest nor principal can be discharged, and the state is bankrupt. When pressed for money, power liberates the revenue according to the phrase we quoted from Adam Smith, by a bankruptcy. It repudiates. Such has been the uniform experience of every nation of Europe, without exception, which has resorted to funding. Repudiation, like death, whether we live fast or

slow, comes at last. Even the Dutch repudiate, at the head as they are, of the best regulated finance in the world-a people so public spirited as to have paid off by voluntary subscription a portion of the capital of their debt, and so thrifty, that it is said they met out of the savings of their income, without touching the capital, all the vast contributions levied upon them by the French, between the conquest of Holland, under the republic, and the fall of Napoleon in 1815, their repudiation consisting of forcible reductions of the rate of interest on their debt, by means of which they sponged out millions and millions of their obligations, just as effectually as the French themselves in 1797, when they demolished two-thirds of the national burden, or as the Spaniards at the present day, when they omit to provide for the quarter's interest as it falls due-a quieter manœuvre than that of the French or Dutch either-but still a bankruptcy.

When kingly prerogative terminated in England, and the power of the nation took its place, they did not owe a dollar beyond King Charles' debt of fourteen hundred thousand pounds and its interest. They might be called free from debt, and there was, therefore, no excuse for funding; but no sooner was Parliament possessed of the reins of authority, rather than tax themselves to raise their supplies within the year-rather than put their patriotic hands into their own pockets, they plunged the nation into this system which ends in inevitable disgrace and bankruptcy-which is in fact itself bankruptcy-a system, says Hume, in his essay on Public Credit, so preposterous, that "It would scarcely be more imprudent to give a prodigal son a credit in every banker's shop in London," than to set a minister upon such a course of finance. Just as the great revolution began by Parliament's offering Charles I. £112,000 to pay a debt-carry on his government and wage a war; so the revolution of 1688 ended by Parliament's taking away from William and Mary the best of all their taxes, and voting them supplies in so shabby and niggardly a spirit, that William, Dutchman and economist as he was, no spendthrift, no waster of revenues, but a man to be trusted with money, who had but one expensive taste, and that the nation partook with him, namely, for being beat by the French, was so heartily disgusted with his kingdom, as to meditate seriously leaving his new subjects to their Romish frights and warming-pans, and retiring to his republic at the Hague. These bountiful English, who gave him a kingdom, denied him the money to govern it. They referred him to borrowing and funding, to a regulated insolvency and eventual repudiation; and to that complexion William came, compelled by his adopted countrymen, and advised by his friend Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, although "the bad faith," as we learn from Browning, an English writer on finance, [p. 512] "observed by preceding English monarchs in their pecuniary contracts, rendered subjects extremely disinclined to entrust their property to the new king;" and a part of his loans was obtained "in small sums of his private friends." We submit, that if the repudiation of Charles II.'s debts was one of the first fruits of the glorious revolution, the general repudiation of all debts to be contracted by England in all future time, was a legacy of that revolution to posterity.

No state that habitually funds is either solvent or honest. The finance of an individual would be thought to be from bedlam, if without saving his income he met all his larger expenses out of borrowed money-in other words, out of capital. The finance of the state, conducted on such principles, is wise enongh, were it but honest; the madman is he who lends, knowing, as he does, that the generation one, two, or three off, must see the investment end in the bankruptcy of the borrower. The state can repudiate and begin to borrow afresh, mankind being, as has been said by Hume, such

fools that they never tire of the game. In 1797, Louis Philip of Orleans, then we presume not far short of thirty years old, saw the French government kick off two-thirds of their debt as if it were an old shoe. The same man, when rising three-score, saw himself on the French throne, and his subjects buying French loans at a premium, as if such a thing as repudiation had never been heard of. Lord Palmerston was a member of the Castlereagh administration, whose repudiating practices knocked down English funds to less than half their par value. His lordship, still we rejoice to hear in the vigor of his days, now stands stiffly up a member of the Russell administiation, and with the funds at full flood, menaces repudiators with extermination. London does not remember paper money any more than Palmerston recollects he was a tory, or Paris the ruin of yesterday. This shortness of men's memories, and their eagerness to be cheated was too much for English virtue, and Parliament, instead of raising supplies like honest men, availed itself of human weakness and funded; and as money has never been in England less than a deity, they have worshipped at the shrine of funds ever since, with an ardor of superstition which has made them at the same time an astonishment to themselves and a laughing-stock to the rest of the world. They went and have continued to go so headlong in their borrowings, that that nation, which in 1688 had no debt at all but the trifling incumbrance which we have mentioned, in less than 130 years, a period which is nothing in the life of a nation, found itself owing 4000 millions of dollars, a sum so vast, that all the money in the world bears no comparison with it in point of magnitude-which not the perversest Englishman ever born could persuade himself is destined to be paid-which thirty-one years of profound peace have not enabled the government to reduce by any amount which is worth the mention, the interest of which for twenty-four years was paid in irredeemable paper, and which the next costly emergency will see paid in nothing at all. King William left the national debt increased to more than sixteen millions; his successor, Queen Anne, left it at fifty-four millions; her successors, George I. and II., increased it to about one hundred and forty millions; and their successor, George III., carried it to the incredible figure which we have just stated, each successive monarch, since 1638, being held by Parliament to their repudiating practices. It was forced finally to such an enormous level by the recoil of the paper money frauds, resorted to at the end of the last century and beginning of this, by the British aristocracy, with the object of hiding the bankruptcy at which they had arrived, and of providing themselves with the means of subsidizing the continent to fight the French; to equip themselves, for what old Frederick used to say was their chief occupation in his day, too, going about to knock at palacegates with a bag of money on their backs. And this brings us to a new and distinguished era of British repudiation.

At the outset of the French revolation, the aristocracy of Europe thought that France was going to pieces, or at least that her new institutions deserved that her neighbors should trample them into the mud, out of which, it was alleged, they came to plague them; and Mr. Pitt joined in the rush that was made at her by the various powers of the continent. Republican France proved more than a match for the whole coalition of kings, and in less than four years Mr. Pitt had halted in the mud himself, in the greatest distress for money, having taxed and borrowed, the war being enormously expensive, until, as he supposed, the force of loans and impositions could go no further. The Bank of England, too, fell lame, though she speedily recovered herself, but not till after she had paid her debts at the counter in sixpences in order to gain time. The government, however, had neither recovered or was likely

to recover, and therefore determined to hide its delinquency under the known distress of the bank, making that institution the scape-goat of an insolvency. Accordingly a Privy Council was held on Sunday the 25th February, 1797, which directed a temporary suspension of payments. in specie. The bank paused, doubted, and then, reluctantly obeying, suspended, a measure to which she was held fast by the ministers and Parliament, all her efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, which manifested themselves at last in the most formal manner on the 26th October, 1797, in a resolution of the Directors, which was communicated to the government, expressing (see it in Parnell on Paper-Money, pp. 6, 7,) their ability and desire to resume, but humbly referring themselves to Parliament upon the question, of what they termed the "political expediency" of the resumption, a question which Parliament peremptorily settled, by directing that the suspension should be continued till the war should be over. Thus the funding system broke down in the form in which it had been forced upon King William, and was carried on by his successors, and had to be patched; and as the French had fought their way with assignats, Mr. Pitt determined to reform it by the total abandonment of the use of coin. The "political expediency" of paper being concluded on, this pilot, as he was termed by his tory followers, organized repudiation in England, as Carnot did victory on the other side of the channel, and the bank became the paper-machine of a paper-paying government. So under paper sails, which were ripped and torn by every gale, the bank, converted into a vast mill to manufacture them, the ship of state sailed, staggered and reeled along through the whole war, and for six years after.

Between February 1797, and May 1821, the British government never paid honestly, within the limits of the kingdom, one single debt; and they committed and carried out more frauds, and created more beggary and misery than they can ever compensate the world for, though they should be destined to a political existence longer than that of China. The aristocracy, a body too unwieldy for open violence, which could not kidnap like Henry VII., now addicted itself to fraud merely, and bankrupt tricks and contrivances. Laws were passed by which Bank of England notes were made a legal tender, and it was a crime punishable at the Old Bailey, not to receive them at par, though notoriously at a discount, and at one period of forty per cent. upon their nominal value; and the government then proceeded, having thus pinioned their unhappy creditors, to cram their villanous paper compound down their throats. The American or any other foreigner who had heard the eternal English boasts of the commercial punctuality of their government, and who had subscribed his money to their loans in gold, was forced to receive his quarterly dividend in paper, at a discount of forty per cent. Or perhaps compelled by losses in trade or otherwise, he sells out his investment, now worth but forty-seven cents on the hundred, for down to that figure came British loans, under the joint influence of their own paper and the victories of the French, and then he receives forty-seven cents for his loan for which he paid one hundred, and upon that forty-seven he loses forty per cent. for the difference between money which is what he wants, and the trash that English faith and Lord Palmerston and his party friends have compelled him to take; and thus plundered, is glad to escape to the banks of the Illinois or Mississippi with what is left. Forty per cent, upon forty-seven per cent! Why, all ye states that shake in the opinion of Mr. Joseph Hume, and you, ye meek followers of Penn, that pay your creditors the difference between gold and paper, and faint