d
be a national debt.

How indeed was it possible that a debt should not have been contracted,
when one party was impelled by the strongest motives to borrow, and
another was impelled by equally strong motives to lend? A moment had
arrived at which the government found it impossible, without exciting
the most formidable discontents, to raise by taxation the supplies
necessary to defend the liberty and independence of the nation; and, at
that very moment, numerous capitalists were looking round them in vain
for some good mode of investing their savings, and, for want of such
a mode, were keeping their wealth locked up, or were lavishing it on
absurd projects. Riches sufficient to equip a navy which would sweep the
German Ocean and the Atlantic of French privateers, riches sufficient
to maintain an army which might retake Namur and avenge the disaster of
Steinkirk, were lying idle, or were passing away from the owners into
the hands of sharpers. A statesman might well think that some part of
the wealth which was daily buried or squandered might, with advantage to
the proprietor, to the taxpayer and to the State, be attracted into the
Treasury. Why meet the extraordinary charge of a year of war by seizing
the chairs, the tables, the beds of hardworking families, by compelling
one country gentleman to cut down his trees before they were ready for
the axe, another to let the cottages on his land fall to ruin, a third
to take away his hopeful son from the University, when Change Alley was
swarming with people who did not know what to do with their money and
who were pressing every body to borrow it?

It was often asserted at a later period by Tories, who hated the
national debt most of all things, and who hated Burnet most of all men,
that Burnet was the person who first advised the government to contract
a national debt. But this assertion is proved by no trustworthy
evidence, and seems to be disproved by the Bishop's silence. Of all men
he was the least likely to conceal the fact that an important fiscal
revolution had been his work. Nor was the Board of Treasury at that time
one which much needed, or was likely much to regard, the counsels of a
divine. At that Board sate Godolphin the most prudent and experienced,
and Montague the most daring and inventive of financiers. Neither of
these eminent men could be ignorant that it had long been the practice
of the neighbouring states to spread over many years of peace the
exce