I was struck with the plausibility of this scheme, at least as applicable to a state of peace; and having obtained the author's permission, if not at his request (I now forget which), I communicated his scheme to Mr. Pitt. Mr. Pitt rejected it at once, with the most pointed reprobation of its principle; and I perfectly recollect, that when I rather stood up for the measure as a peace-arrangement, he said, that whenever the time should come that the diminution of the rate of interest was felt to be an evil, he had other ideas as to the best mode of obviating that evil, by converting it to a great public advantage; and that, in a state of war, the plan would be ruinous and inadmissible. I well remember some still harsher terms which Mr. Pitt applied to this suggestion; but I will not repeat them, because it is in principle and in effect the same measure as that of my right honourable friend. But if they are the same in principle, the circumstances of the present time and of 1802 are widely different. In 1802, we were in a state of peace; credit was high, the accumulation of unredeemed debt was much smaller than at present, without any expectation at that moment that it would be necessary soon to add to that accumulation. In 1813, we are engaged in a most extensive war, our credit very much impaired, our unredeemed debt increased, and now annually increasing in a most alarming degree.

Here, then, is the direct testimony of Mr. Pitt, in opposition to vague inferences; and I have no manner of doubt that, if his voice could now be heard amongst us, my right honourable friend's plan would not endure for a single hour.

That plan, in its principle, may truly be described as an expedient for pushing the debt in time of war to the maximum of its amount, by reducing the Sinking Fund to the minimum of its power.

It is an error which must sooner or later prove

fatal to

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our credit, that we are doing enough, if we reserve such a Sinking Fund as would redeem our debt in forty-five years, without reference to the total amount of that debt. proportion of the Sinking Fund to the unredeemed debt is but a secondary consideration: the actual amount of that debt ought to be the first object of our solicitude. It is undeniable in theory, that a debt of a thousand millions would as certainly be liquidated in forty-five years by a Sinking Fund of ten millions, as that a debt of a hundred millions would be liquidated by a Sinking Fund of one million. But in practice a debt of a hundred millions might be safe, and possibly salutary to the State, even without any Sinking Fund at all; whilst a thousand millions of unredeemed debt, all liable to be brought into the market, might, under many conceivable circumstances, entirely break down that credit, which the smaller sum would in no degree impair. Comparisons of this nature, in proportion as they are true in arithmetic, are dangerous in the concerns of nations. Whilst they gratify ingenuity in the closet, they may undermine our resources upon Stock Exchange.

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I shall probably be reminded, that, whatever there may be in common between the plan rejected by Mr. Pitt in 1802, and the measure now before us, the latter comes recommended by many peculiar advantages, which more than counterbalance the objections to which it may be liable. Any proposal which postpones the necessity of adding to our burdens, however pregnant with difficulty and danger that proposal may be in its probable and not distant consequences, cannot fail, especially if those consequences are kept out of sight, to be favourably received by this House and the public. The plan of my right honourable friend possesses, undoubtedly, that claim to favour. If he

had called for your support upon that claim only, the discussion would have been much simplified. But, in my right honourable friend's statement, this benefit, which I have no wish to undervalue, is obscured and lost amidst the blaze of more brilliant advantages and dazzling prospects, which have been opened to us on this occasion.

From the very sincere respect which I feel for my right honourable friend, it really gives me pain to be obliged to refer at all to these other advantages of his plan. For I cannot help saying, and he will excuse me for taking this liberty with them, that they appear to me calculated to confuse and perplex, without at all meliorating his system.

These other advantages of the plan amount to four: first, that it provides for a gradual and equable reduction of the national debt: secondly, that it provides against the evils likely to arise from too rapid a diminution of the rate of interest: thirdly, that it provides an immediate subsidy of a hundred and twenty millions, for carrying on the war and fourthly, that it provides for the accumulation of a treasure of a hundred millions, in time of peace, as a reserve for any future war.

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With respect to the first of these advantages, I know not in what terms to express my astonishment. gradual and equable reduction of the national debt!" as if that reduction was at this moment too rapid-as if there was any thing arbitrary and capricious in the present mode of applying the Sinking Fund! Again, as if we had already done too much in the way of reduction of a debt, which, when the new Sinking Fund began, was little more than two hundred millions, and which now exceeds six hundred millions unredeemed,-as if it were necessary, in order to make that reduction more equable, to diminish the amount of the Sinking Fund of the year, in proportion as the amount of the loan is increased,—as if it were particu

larly wise and pressing to begin to check the growth of the Sinking Fund in the present year, when the loan to be raised, joined to what remains unredeemed of that of last year, will make a greater addition to the debt, than all that was added to it in the six preceding years of the war!

That my right honourable friend should have spent his valuable time in providing, at this moment, for the second of these advantages, is to me still more surprising. "The evils likely to arise from too rapid a diminution of the rate of interest," when, with all the aid which credit has derived from the present rapidly growing Sinking Fund,-with all the improvements, wonderful and extensive beyond the hopes of the most sanguine, in our political situation,— with all the temptation which a nominal capital holds out to the lender in the three per cents.-my right honourable friend is not able, even in that favourite fund, to raise a single 1007. within the legal rate of interest! With these circumstances before him,-and with a loan to be negociated for the service of the year, which cannot be much short of forty millions, what is the step taken by my right honourable friend with a view to an immediate practical effect? Why, a successive diminution of the Sinking Fund, infinitely more rapid than its growth has ever been, to be accompanied with a series of loans much larger than were ever before raised in this country. What is the disease which now affects our public credit? When my right honourable friend was first called in, he did not hesitate to declare, that his patient was "labouring" (to use his own expression) under great weakness and depression; but, by way of comfort, he assured us that at his next call he should be prepared with some very invigorating remedy. This is his second visit, for which we have been looking forward with so much hope. The symptoms of the disease continue nearly the same, or rather worse; but what says the phy

sician? He tells you, that, in turning the case in his mind, it has occurred to him, that his patient, if he should not sink under his present exhausting complaint, may possibly be liable at some distant period of his life (as nearly as he can now prognosticate, about the year 1830), to the inconvenience of repletion. Therefore, as an apt remedy for this distant disorder, he prescribes, instead of the promised restorative, a copious bleeding forthwith; and that it should be followed, in rapid succession, by three other bleedings still more severe. If the patient should undergo this discipline, the natural consequences must follow; and I agree with my right honourable friend, that the numerous friends of that patient, the whole body of the public creditors, should (as the phrase is) be prepared for the event. By the time of the fourth bleeding, should the present complaint continue, the most sanguine among them will, I think, have little doubt as to the result; and their mourning on the melancholy occasion will, I am satisfied, be not only very general, but very sincere.

But this is a distant danger, which good fortune may, after all, avert; and, in the mean time, my right honourable friend's plan gives us an immediate subsidy of a hundred and twenty millions for carrying on the war. When this subsidy was first mentioned, I really imagined that my right honourable friend had at last found that philosopher's stone, which Van Helmont, and so many other ingenious men of former times, had spent their lives in vain endeavours to find; or, at least, as was often the case with them, that, in searching for it, he had accidently stumbled upon some other very useful discovery;-that he had found a treasure to this amount in some dark recess or secret drawer of the Exchequer, where it had been hoarded and forgotten by one of his predecessors. But when I came to understand what the finding actually was, my hopes were sadly