n.

The funding system is not money; neither is it, properly speaking,
credit. It, in effect, creates upon paper the sum which it appears to
borrow, and lays on a tax to keep the imaginary capital alive by the
payment of interest and sends the annuity to market, to be sold for
paper already in circulation. If any credit is given, it is to the
disposition of the people to pay the tax, and not to the government,
which lays it on. When this disposition expires, what is supposed to be
the credit of Government expires with it. The instance of France under
the former Government shows that it is impossible to compel the payment
of taxes by force, when a whole nation is determined to take its stand
upon that ground.

Mr. Burke, in his review of the finances of France, states the quantity
of gold and silver in France, at about eighty-eight millions sterling.
In doing this, he has, I presume, divided by the difference of exchange,
instead of the standard of twenty-four livres to a pound sterling; for
M. Neckar's statement, from which Mr. Burke's is taken, is two thousand
two hundred millions of livres, which is upwards of ninety-one millions
and a half sterling.

M. Neckar in France, and Mr. George Chalmers at the Office of Trade and
Plantation in England, of which Lord Hawkesbury is president, published
nearly about the same time (1786) an account of the quantity of money in
each nation, from the returns of the Mint of each nation. Mr. Chalmers,
from the returns of the English Mint at the Tower of London, states
the quantity of money in England, including Scotland and Ireland, to be
twenty millions sterling.*[12]

M. Neckar*[13] says that the amount of money in France, recoined from
the old coin which was called in, was two thousand five hundred millions
of livres (upwards of one hundred and four millions sterling); and,
after deducting for waste, and what may be in the West Indies and other
possible circumstances, states the circulation quantity at home to be
ninety-one millions and a half sterling; but, taking it as Mr. Burke has
put it, it is sixty-eight millions more than the national quantity in
England.

That the quantity of money in France cannot be under this sum, may at
once be seen from the state of the French Revenue, without referring to
the records of the French Mint for proofs. The revenue of France, prior
to the Revolution, was nearly twenty-four millions sterling; and as
paper had then no existence in Franc