he wars for the hundred years that are past. But long
before it could have reached this period, the value of bank notes,
from the immense quantity of them, (for it is in paper only that such
a nominal revenue could be collected,) would have been as low or lower
than continental paper has been in America, or assignats in France; and
as to the idea of exchanging them for gold and silver, it is too absurd
to be contradicted.

Do we not see that nature, in all her operations, disowns the visionary
basis upon which the funding system is built? She acts always by
renewed successions, and never by accumulating additions perpetually
progressing. Animals and vegetables, men and trees, have existed since
the world began: but that existence has been carried on by succession
of generations, and not by continuing the same men and the same trees in
existence that existed first; and to make room for the new she removes
the old. Every natural idiot can see this; it is the stock-jobbing idiot
only that mistakes. He has conceived that art can do what nature cannot.
He is teaching her a new system--that there is no occasion for man to
die--that the scheme of creation can be carried on upon the plan of
the funding system--that it can proceed by continual additions of new
beings, like new loans, and all live together in eternal youth. Go,
count the graves, thou idiot, and learn the folly of thy arithmetic!

But besides these things, there is something visibly farcical in the
whole operation of loaning. It is scarcely more than four years ago
that such a rot of bankruptcy spread itself over London, that the whole
commercial fabric tottered; trade and credit were at a stand; and
such was the state of things that, to prevent or suspend a general
bankruptcy, the government lent the merchants six millions in
_government_ paper, and now the merchants lend the government twenty-two
millions in _their_ paper; and two parties, Boyd and Morgan, men but
little known, contend who shall be the lenders. What a farce is this!
It reduces the operation of loaning to accommodation paper, in which
the competitors contend, not who shall lend, but who shall sign, because
there is something to be got for signing.

Every English stock-jobber and minister boasts of the credit of England.
Its credit, say they, is greater than that of any country in Europe.
There is a good reason for this: for there is not another country in
Europe that could be made the dupe of s