ant to describe that
age of decrepitude in which death is every day to be expected, and life
cannot continue long. But the death of credit, or that state that is
called bankruptcy, is not always marked by those progressive stages
of visible decline that marked the decline of natural life. In the
progression of natural life age cannot counterfeit youth, nor conceal
the departure of juvenile abilities. But it is otherwise with respect
to the death of credit; for though all the approaches to bankruptcy
may actually exist in circumstances, they admit of being concealed by
appearances. Nothing is more common than to see the bankrupt of to-day a
man in credit but the day before; yet no sooner is the real state of
his affairs known, than every body can see he had been insolvent long
before. In London, the greatest theatre of bankruptcy in Europe, this
part of the subject will be well and feelingly understood.

Mr. Pitt continually talks of credit, and the national resources. These
are two of the feigned appearances by which the approaches to bankruptcy
are concealed. That which he calls credit may exist, as I have just
shown, in a state of insolvency, and is always what I have before
described it to be, _suspicion asleep_.

As to national resources, Mr. Pitt, like all English financiers that
preceded him since the funding system began, has uniformly mistaken the
nature of a resource; that is, they have mistaken it consistently with
the delusion of the funding system; but time is explaining the delusion.
That which he calls, and which they call, a resource, is not a resource,
but is the _anticipation_ of a resource. They have anticipated what
_would have been_ a resource in another generation, had not the use of
it been so anticipated. The funding system is a system of anticipation.
Those who established it an hundred years ago anticipated the resources
of those who were to live an hundred years after; for the people of the
present day have to pay the interest of the debts contracted at that
time, and all debts contracted since. But it is the last feather that
breaks the horse's back. Had the system begun an hundred years before,
the amount of taxes at this time to pay the annual interest at four per
cent. (could we suppose such a system of insanity could have continued)
would be two hundred and twenty millions annually: for the capital of
the debt would be 5486 millions, according to the ratio that ascertains
the expense of t