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 everybody 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 sat 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 neighboring states to spread over many years of peace the excessive taxation which was made necessary by one year of war. In Italy this practice had existed through many generations. France had during the war which began in 1672 and ended in 1679 borrowed not less than thirty millions of our money. Sir William Temple, in his interesting work on the Batavian federation, had told his countrymen that when he was ambassador at The Hague, the single province of Holland, then ruled by the frugal and prudent De Witt, owed about five millions sterling, for which interest at four per cent. was always ready to the day, and that when any part of the principal was paid off the public creditor received his money with tears, well knowing that he could find no other investment equally secure. The wonder is not that England should have at length imitated the example both of her enemies and of her allies, but that the fourth year of her arduous and exhausting struggle against Lewis should have been drawing to a close before she resorted to an expedient so obvious. On the 15th of December, 1692, the House of Commons resolved itself into a committee of ways and means. Somers took the chair. Montague proposed to raise a million by way of loan; the proposition was approved, and it was ordered that a bill should be brought in. The details of the scheme were much discussed and modified, but the principle appears to have been popular with all parties. The moneyed men were glad to have a good opportunity of investing what they had hoarded. The landed men, hard pressed by the load of taxation, were ready to consent to anything for the sake of present ease. No member ventured to divide the House. On the 20th of January the bill was read a third time, carried up to the Lords by Somers and passed by them without any amendment. By this memorable law new duties were imposed on beer and other liquors. These duties were to be kept in the exchequer separate from all other receipts, and were to form a fund on the credit of which a million was to be raised by life-annuities. As the annuitants dropped off their annuities were to be divided among the survivors till the number of survivors was reduced to seven. After that time whatever fell in was to go to the public. It was therefore certain that the eighteenth century would be far advanced before the debt would be finally extinguished. The rate of interest was to be ten per cent. till the year 1700, and after that year seven per cent. The advantages offered to the public creditor by this scheme may seem great, but were not more than sufficient to compensate him for the risk which he ran. It was not impossible that there might be a counterrevolution; and it was certain that if there were a counter-revolution, those who had lent money to William would lose both interest and principal. house orators, but by acute and profound thinkers-as an encumbrance which would permanently cripple the body politic. Nevertheless, trade flourished; wealth increased; the nation became richer and richer. Then came the war of the Austrian Succession, and the debt rose to eighty millions. Pamphleteers, historians and orators pronounced that now, at all events, our case was desperate. Yet the signs of increasing prosperity—signs which could neither be counterfeited nor concealed ought to have satisfied observant and reflecting men that a debt of eighty millions was less to the England which was governed by Pelham than a debt of fifty millions had been to the England which was governed by Oxford. Soon war again broke forth; and under the energetic and prodigal administration of the first William Pitt the debt rapidly swelled to a hundred and forty millions. As soon as the first intoxication of victory was over, men of theory and men of business almost unanimously pronounced that the fatal Such was the origin of that debt which has day had now really arrived. The only statessince become the greatest prodigy that ever man, indeed, active or speculative, who did not perplexed the sagacity and confounded the share in the general delusion was Edmund pride of statesmen and philosophers. At Burke. David Hume, undoubtedly one of every stage in the growth of that debt the the most profound political economists of his nation has set up the same cry of anguish time, declared that our madness had exceeded and despair. At every stage in the growth the madness of the crusaders. Richard Cour of that debt it has been seriously asserted de Lion and St. Lewis had not gone in the by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were face of arithmetical demonstration. It was at hand. Yet still the debt went on grow- impossible to prove by figures that the road ing, and still bankruptcy and ruin were as to Paradise did not lie through the Holy remote as ever. When the great contest Land, but it was possible to prove by figures with Lewis XIV. was finally terminated that the road to national ruin was through the by the Peace of Utrecht, the nation owed national debt. It was idle, however, now to about fifty millions; and that debt was con- talk about the road: we had done with the sidered-not merely by the rude multitude, road; we had reached the goal. All was not merely by fox-hunting squires and coffee- over; all the revenues of the island north of Trent and west of Reading were mort gaged. Better for us to have been conquered by Prussia or Austria than to be saddled with the interest of a hundred and forty millions. And yet this great philosopher-for such he was-had only to open his eyes and to see improvement all around him: cities increasing, cultivation extending, marts too small for the crowd of buyers and sellers, harbors insufficient to contain the shipping, artificial rivers joining the chief inland seats of indus- | try to the chief seaports, streets better lighted, houses better furnished, richer wares exposed to sale in statelier shops, swifter carriages rolling along smoother roads. He had, indeed, only to compare the Edinburgh of his boyhood with the Edinburgh of his old age. His prediction remains to posterity, a memorable instance of the weakness from which the strongest minds are not exempt. Adam Smith saw a little, and but a little, farther. He admitted that, immense as the burden was, the nation did actually sustain it and thrive under it in a way which nobody could have foreseen. But he warned his countrymen not to repeat so hazardous an experiment. The limit had been reached. Even a small increase might be fatal. Not less gloomy was the view which George Grenville, a minister eminently diligent and practical, took of our financial situation. The nation must, he conceived, sink under a debt of a hundred and forty millions unless a portion of the load were borne by the American colonies. The attempt to lay a portion of the load on the American colonies produced another war. That war left us with an additional hundred millions of debt, and without the colonies whose help had been represented as indispensable. Again England was given over, and again the strange patient persisted in becoming stronger and more blooming in spite of all the diagnostics and prognostics of state-physicians. As she had been visibly more prosperous with a debt of a hundred and forty millions than with a debt of fifty millions, so she was visibly more prosperous with a debt of two hundred and forty millions than with a debt of a hundred and forty millions. Soon, however, the wars which sprang from the French Revolution, and which far exceeded in cost any that the world had ever seen, tasked the powers of public credit to the utmost. When the world was again at rest, the funded debt of England amounted to eight hundred millions. If the most enlightened man had been told in 1792 that in 1815 the interest on eight hundred millions would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. It was, in truth, a gigantic, a fabulous, debt, and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found to have been as unreasonable as ever. After a few years of exhaustion England recovered herself. Yet, like Addison's valetudinarian, who continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so fat that he was shamed into silence, she went on complaining that she was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by. tokens which made her complaints ridiculous. The beggared, the bankrupt, society not only proved able to meet all its obligations, but, while meeting those obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the debt grew, and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt. be discerned by the eye. In every county we saw wastes recently turned into gardens; in every city we saw new streets and squares and markets, more brilliant lamps, more abundant supplies of water; in the suburbs of every great seat of industry we saw villas multiply-progress of every experimental science, and ing fast, each embosomed in its gay little paradise of lilacs and roses. While shallow politicians were repeating that the energies of the people were borne down by the weight of the public burdens, the first journey was performed by steam on a railway. Soon the island was intersected by railways. A sum exceeding the whole amount of the national debt at the end of the American war was in a few years voluntarily expended by this ruined people in viaducts, tunnels, embankments, bridges, stations, engines. Meanwhile, taxation was almost constantly becoming lighter and lighter, yet still the exchequer was full. It may be now affirmed without fear of contradiction that we find it as easy to pay the interest of eight hundred millions as our ancestors found it, a century ago, to pay the interest of eighty millions. A long experience justifies us in believing that England may in the twentieth century be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load. But be this as it may, those who so confidently predicted that she must sink-first under a debt of fifty millions, then under a debt of eighty millions, then under a debt of a hundred and forty millions, then under a debt of two hundred and forty millions, and lastly under a debt of eight hundred millions-were, beyond all doubt, under a twofold mistake. They greatly overrated the pressure of the burden; they greatly underrated the strength by which the burden was to be borne. It can hardly be doubted that there must have been some great fallacy in the notions It may be desirable to add a few words of those who uttered and of those who be- touching the way in which the system of lieved that long succession of confident pre- funding has affected the interests of the dictions so signally falsified by a long suc- great commonwealth of nations. If it be cession of indisputable facts. To point out true that whatever gives to intelligence an that fallacy is the office rather of the polit- advantage over brute force and to honesty ical economist than of the historian. Here an advantage over dishonesty has a tendit is sufficient to say that the prophets of ency to promote the happiness and virtue evil were under a double delusion. They of our race, it can scarcely be denied that in erroneously imagined that there was an an the largest view the effect of this system has exact analogy between the case of an indi- been salutary. For it is manifest that all vidual who is in debt to another individual credit depends on two things-on the power and the case of a society which is in debt to of a debtor to pay debts, and on his inclinaa part of itself; and this analogy led them tion to pay them. The power of a society to pay debts is proportioned to the progress which that society has made in industry, in commerce and in all the arts and sciences which flourish under the benignant influence of freedom and of equal law. The inclination of a society to pay debts is proportioned to the degree in which that society respects the obligations of plighted faith. Of the strength which consists in extent of territory and in number of fighting-men, a rude despot who knows no law but his own childish fancies and headstrong passions, or a convention of socialists which proclaims all property to be robbery, may have more than falls to the lot of the best and wisest government. But the strength which is derived from the confidence of capitalists such a despot, such a convention, never can possess. That strength-and it is a strength which has decided the event of more than one great conflict-flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism and fraud, from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilization and virtue, liberty and order. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. MADAME DE STAËL. AFTER THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. SHE HE was happy in her heart as she was glorious in her genius. She had two children-a son, who did not display the éclat of his mother, but who promised to have all the solid and modest qualities of a patriot and a good man; and also a daughter, since married to the duke De Broglie, who resembled the purest and most beautiful thought of her mother, incarnate in an angelic form, to elevate the mind to heaven and to represent holiness in beauty. While scarcely yet in the middle age of life, and blooming with that second youth which renews the imagination, that essence of love, Madame de Staël had married the dearest idol of her sensibility. She loved, and she was loved. She prepared herself to publish her Considerations on the Revolution, which she had so closely observed, and the personal and impassioned narrative of her Ten Years of Exile. Finally, a book on the genius of Germany (in which she had poured out, and as it were filtered drop by drop, all the springs of her soul, of her imagination and of her religion) appeared at the same time in France and England and excited the attention of all Europe. Her style, especially in the work on Germany, without lacking the splendor of her youth, seemed to be imbued with lights more lofty and more eternal in approaching the evening of life and the mysterious shrine of thought. It was no longer painting, nor merely poetry: it was perfect adoration. The incense of a soul was inhaled from its pages; it was Corinne" become a priestess and catching a glimpse from the verge of life of the unknown deity in the remotest horizon of humanity. About this period she died in Paris, leaving a bright resplendence in the heart of her age. She was the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of women, but more tender, more sensitive and more capable of great action than he was a genius of two sexes, one for thought and one for love-the most impassioned of women and the most masculine of writers in the same being. Her name will live as long as the literature and history of her country. ALPHONSE MARIE LOUIS DE LAMARTINE. |