this table. Those who are not acquainted with that subject,
and not knowing what else to say, may be inclined to deny it. But it is
not their opinion one way, nor mine the other, that can influence the
event. The table exhibits the natural march of the funding system to its
irredeemable dissolution. Supposing the present government of England to
continue, and to go on as it has gone on since the funding system began,
I would not give twenty shillings for one hundred pounds in the funds to
be paid twenty years hence. I do not speak this predictively; I produce
the data upon which that belief is founded; and which data it is every
body's interest to know, who have any thing to do with the funds, or
who are going to bequeath property to their descendants to be paid at a
future day.

Perhaps it may be asked, that as governments or ministers proceeded by
no ratio in making loans or incurring debts, and nobody intended any
ratio, or thought of any, how does it happen that there is one? I
answer, that the ratio is founded in necessity; and I now go to explain
what that necessity is.

It will always happen, that the price of labour, or of the produce
of labour, be that produce what it may, will be in proportion to the
quantity of money in a country, admitting things to take their natural
course. Before the invention of the funding system, there was no other
money than gold and silver; and as nature gives out those metals with
a sparing hand, and in regular annual quantities from the mines, the
several prices of things were proportioned to the quantity of money at
that time, and so nearly stationary as to vary but little in any fifty
or sixty years of that period.

When the funding system began, a substitute for gold and silver began
also. That substitute was paper; and the quantity increased as the
quantity of interest increased upon accumulated loans. This appearance
of a new and additional species of money in the nation soon began to
break the relative value which money and the things it will purchase
bore to each other before. Every thing rose in price; but the rise at
first was little and slow, like the difference in units between two
first numbers, 8 and 12, compared with the two last numbers 90 and 135,
in the table. It was however sufficient to make itself considerably felt
in a large transaction. When therefore government, by engaging in a new
war, required a new loan, it was obliged to make a higher loan than the
f