stablished themselves in France. There
was no paper money in France before the present revolution, and the
taxes were collected in gold and silver money. The highest quantity of
taxes never exceeded twenty-two millions sterling; and the quantity of
gold and silver money in the nation at the same time, as stated by M.
Neckar, from returns of coinage at the Mint, in his Treatise on the
Administration of the Finances, was about ninety millions sterling. To
go beyond this limit of a fourth part, in England, they were obliged to
introduce paper money; and the attempt to go beyond it in France, where
paper could not be introduced, broke up the government. This proportion,
therefore, of a fourth part, is the limit which the thing establishes
for itself, be the quantity of money in a nation more or less.

The amount of taxes in England at this time is full twenty millions;
and therefore the quantity of gold and silver, and of bank notes, taken
together, amounts to eighty millions. The quantity of gold and silver,
as stated by Lord Hawkes-bury's Secretary, George Chalmers, as I have
before shown, is twenty millions; and, therefore, the total amount
of bank notes in circulation, all made payable on demand, is sixty
millions. This enormous sum will astonish the most stupid stock-jobber,
and overpower the credulity of the most thoughtless Englishman: but were
it only a third part of that sum, the bank cannot pay half a crown in
the pound.

There is something curious in the movements of this modern complicated
machine, the funding system; and it is only now that it is beginning
to unfold the full extent of its movements. In the first part of its
movements it gives great powers into the hands of government, and in the
last part it takes them completely away.

The funding system set out with raising revenues under the name of
loans, by means of which government became both prodigal and powerful.
The loaners assumed the name of creditors, and though it was soon
discovered that loaning was government-jobbing, those pretended loaners,
or the persons who purchased into the funds afterwards, conceived
themselves not only to be creditors, but to be the _only_ creditors.

But such has been the operation of this complicated machine, the funding
system, that it has produced, unperceived, a second generation of
creditors, more numerous and far more formidable and withal more
real than the first generation; for every holder of a bank note is