t, like Boyd and others, are contracting or pretending to
contract for new loans, they will conceive they have a just right that
their bank notes should be paid first. Boyd has been very sly in France,
in changing his paper into cash. He will be just as sly in doing the
same thing in London, for he has learned to calculate; and then it is
probable he will set off for America.

A stoppage of payment at the bank is not a new thing. Smith in his
Wealth of Nations, book ii. chap. 2, says, that in the year 1696,
exchequer bills fell forty, fifty, and sixty per cent; bank notes twenty
per cent; and the bank stopped payment. That which happened in 1696 may
happen again in 1796. The period in which it happened was the last year
of the war of King William. It necessarily put a stop to the further
emissions of exchequer and navy bills, and to the raising of new loans;
and the peace which took place the next year was probably hurried on by
this circumstance, and saved the bank from bankruptcy. Smith in speaking
from the circumstances of the bank, upon another occasion, says (book
ii. chap. 2.) "This great company had been reduced to the necessity
of paying in sixpences." When a bank adopts the expedient of paying in
sixpences, it is a confession of insolvency.

It is worthy of observation, that every case of failure in finances,
since the system of paper began, has produced a revolution in
governments, either total or partial. A failure in the finances of
France produced the French revolution. A failure in the finance of
the assignats broke up the revolutionary government, and produced
the present French Constitution. A failure in the finances of the Old
Congress of America, and the embarrassments it brought upon commerce,
broke up the system of the old confederation, and produced the federal
Constitution. If, then, we admit of reasoning by comparison of causes
and events, the failure of the English finances will produce some change
in the government of that country.

As to Mr. Pitt's project of paying off the national debt by applying
a million a-year for that purpose, while he continues adding more than
twenty millions a-year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg
to run after a hare. The longer he runs the farther he is off.

When I said that the funding system had entered the last twenty years
of its existence, I certainly did not mean that it would continue twenty
years, and then expire as a lease would do. I me