sted its reply to Ralph Broome and George Chalmers, who
wrote pamphlets. There is in the French Archives an order
for 1000 copies, April 27, 1796, nineteen days after Paine's
pamphlet appeared. "Mr. Cobbett has made this little
pamphlet a text-book for most of his elaborate treatises on
our finances.... On the authority of a late Register of Mr.
Cobbett's I learn that the profits arising from the sale of
this pamphlet were devoted [by Paine] to the relief of the
prisoners confined in Newgate for debt."--"Life of Paine,"
by Richard Carlile, 1819.--_Editor._.

Debates in Parliament.

Nothing, they say, is more certain than death, and nothing more
uncertain than the time of dying; yet we can always fix a period beyond
which man cannot live, and within some moment of which he will die. We
are enabled to do this, not by any spirit of prophecy, or foresight into
the event, but by observation of what has happened in all cases of human
or animal existence. If then any other subject, such, for instance, as
a system of finance, exhibits in its progress a series of symptoms
indicating decay, its final dissolution is certain, and the period of it
can be calculated from the symptoms it exhibits.

Those who have hitherto written on the English system of finance, (the
funding system,) have been uniformly impressed with the idea that its
downfall would happen _some time or other_. They took, however, no data
for their opinion, but expressed it predictively,--or merely as opinion,
from a conviction that the perpetual duration of such a system was a
natural impossibility. It is in this manner that Dr. Price has spoken of
it; and Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, has spoken in the same manner;
that is, merely as opinion without data. "The progress," says Smith,
"of the enormous debts, which at present oppress, and will in the long
run _most probably ruin_, all the great nations of Europe [he should
have said _governments_] has been pretty uniform." But this general
manner of speaking, though it might make some impression, carried with
it no conviction.

It is not my intention to predict any thing; but I will show from data
already known, from symptoms and facts which the English funding system
has already exhibited publicly, that it will not continue to the end of
Mr. Pitt's life, supposing him to live the usual age of a man. How much
sooner it may fall, I leave to others to predict.

Le