who were more than indemnified, and even with those who had been enriched? or could it be hazarded as doctrine by any political œconomist, that a nation so circumstanced could be equally powerful or prosperous, or its inhabitants equally happy as if the public wealth flowed in a natural current through all the various classes of the civilized world? Such sophistry might well pass current in England, where nobody has an interest in questioning it, because our debt is too insignificant to raise up antagonists to oppose it; but if we had seventy millions to pay annually, a sum more than half the rental of our whole kingdom, and if only three or four millions of our people, out of our whole great population, received any part of it back again, but remained in a comparative state of poverty and exclusion, the air would ring with exclamations against the propagation of an error so palpably dangerous and destructive.

"It cannot, indeed, be better exposed, since it should only be met by ridicule, than by telling