tion again; but to what extent that might happen is uncertain, as much of the specie might be removed to other countries, and at all events, it would require some time to pass the money issued by the government through the proper channels into the pockets of the contributors, who would pay it back to government. Even though all that complicated circulation should go on regularly, still the sum required by government within five or six years amounts, independent of the sum to be contributed by the fundholders, to about seven times the circulating medium of the whole nation, including the notes of country banks. So that every atom of circulating medium in the kingdom would require to pass through the hands of government twice in each year and a half, a thing impossible in itself, and which, if possible, would leave no circulating medium to be applied to other purposes, which of themselves do at present require so great a sum. It is plain, therefore, that the great increase of transactions which would suddenly be occasioned by the plan in question, would most materially affect the state of the currency. A small part of the difficulty here pointed out would be obviated by the fundholder becoming the purchaser of property sold, to pay the proprietor's assessment, and giving him, instead of money, an order on government; but it has been already shewn, that this sort of traffic is not likely to take place to any considerable extent.

Mr Heathfield proposes that the property held by ex-resident foreigners in British funds, should be exempted from the assessment. But would not the result of that exemption be, that a great proportion of the national debt would be transferred to foreigners, or at least to the name of foreigners, on the agitation of the question? He also proposes to allow manufacturers, shipowners, merchants, traders, &c. from five to ten years, to pay up their assessments. The property held by that class of persons is very great; in 1813, the value of the manufactured goods in Great Britain, in progress to maturity, was 140 millions-the value of foreign merchandize belonging to Britain, deposited in warehouses, &c. was 40 millions and the value of the shipping employed in trade was 27 millions. But although all that property

should be assessed, yet the greater part, or rather the whole of it, would be exported, or consumed, or transferred, long before the expiry of ten years, and what security can government have for the solvency of the original holders, or their remaining with their capital within the kingdom? The alienation of British capital, and the concealment of funds under the cover of foreign names and the like devices, seem inevitable consequences of the mere agitation of the measure, or at least of any serious proposal for carrying it into effect.

But after all, Mr Heathfield's plan is but a sort of half measure. The difficulties we have pointed out, are to be encountered without the prospect of getting rid of the public debt. Mr Heathfield tells us, that even supposing all the assessment to be regularly and punctually paid, still 350 millions of debt would remain undischarged. Granting that even a partial discharge of the public debt would be a great relief, still it is very doubtful whether it ought to be attempted at the risk of so much inconvenience, so much evil, so much ruin, to many individuals, as must accompany the undertaking. The risk, or sacrifice, which it might be proper to incur for the complete and final accomplishment of an important purpose, ought not to be incurred for a mere partial attainment of it. To pay off the balance of £350,000,000, it would be necessary to keep up the sinking fund, and to maintain the same establishment of tax-gatherers, &c. to collect the means for paying the annual interest of the debt; so that the relief promised is by no means adequate to the great sacrifice which the holders of property are asked to make; and the still greater risk which they and the nation at large are called upon to run. Heathfield indeed proposes to pay off this balance of £350,000,000, but how does he propose to accomplish that object? By borrowing, or in other words, incurring a new debt to the same amount. The benefit to result from such a proceeding, we do not perceive. Mr Heathfield to be sure says, that the nation would borrow at the rate of three per cent. interest, or in other words, the nation would borrow from A £100 at the rate of £3 per annum, to pay B a like sum, for which he only receives from the nation £3 per annum.

Mr

It is plain, that the nation would not benefit by such a transaction. It is very true, that B only paid, perhaps, £60 for the right to draw the £3 per annum, but if the nation cannot pay him off under £100, (which is Mr Heathfield's idea) it is all one whether he draws the £3 per annum, or A draws it-the national debt remains the same the nation is in either case pledged to pay £3 per annum, until it pays up a principal sum of L.100; and if A now advances the L.100 to pay off B who only advanced L.60, still as B is entitled to draw a full L.100, that is, L.40 besides his own original L.60, Government will only retain in its hands L.60 for the L.3 per annum which it will be obliged to pay to A.

But further-Upon what principle does Mr Heathfield hold, that government could borrow at three per cent. We confess, we cannot see any good reason for that opinion. We should rather be inclined to think, that as a considerable part of the money, or capital of the country, would be employed in the payment of exresident foreigners, who are at present stockholders-as a considerable demand for money would be created by the holders of property borrowing to pay their assessments-as in the anticipated

event of the profits of stock being increased, the demand for capital would also be increased, there would be no chance of the rate of interest falling so low as to enable Government to borrow at three per cent.

These considerations have impressed us with the opinion, that Mr Heathfield's plan, however plausible and ingenious, is neither practicable nor safe, and therefore, possesses neither of the two requisites which he has himself laid down as necessary to recommend any plan for the liquidation of the public debt. Whether the national debt is ever to be paid off, or what is likely to be the consequence of permitting it to remain undischarged, are questions of great magnitude and importance, but on which we cannot at present enter. The task to which we have limited ourselves is to point out what appear to us to be the chief defects of the plan proposed, and if our remarks tend, in any degree, to assist the author in framing a better plan, the circumstance will afford us sincere pleasure; if, on the other hand, our objections are founded on an erroneous view of the plan we have been considering, we shall be glad to be corrected.

PROVERBS, XI. 8.

It is natural that the enemies of administration should be vigilant in detecting its errors, and exposing its abuses; and when we consider the splendid prize which rewards success in this career of vigilance and exposure, we must pardon a little exaggeration to the frailty of ambition. But with all this tolerance, it is still difficult to account for, and impossible to justify the spirit in which the opposition to the government of this country has for many years been conducted. Clearing, by one frantic bound, the limits of moderation, the opponents of ministers have ventured to explore the darkest regions of theory, and some of them have even made their lodg

ment in the very confines of sedition. Whether it be, that disappointment, continued beyond the endurance of human pride, has soured their tempers, or that their organized hostility to the actual occupants of power has betrayed them into an unscrupulous alliance with the profligacy which aims, not at its correction, but its destruction-it may be difficult to determine; but no one, who has cast even a casual glance over the history of this country for the last twenty-five years, can have failed to observe, that the opposition directed against the measures of the English administration has, during that period, assumed a character essentially novel in the an

nals of England,-a character which presents an ominous approach to the worst spirit of republican faction.

It would be unjust to include the whole members of the opposition party in one sweeping sentence of condemnation. But of many, and those not obscure individuals, who flourished during the troubled period of the late war, it is but impartial justice to assert, that they acted from the apparent impulse of any thing but the old Whig spirit, that they did not scruple to avow their conversion to a system of fantastic reform, the very mention of which was a reproach upon the institutions of their country,-that from the beginning they volunteered, with questionable enthusiasm, in the support of a revolution in a neighbouring country, of which they must have been aware the example could not be without weighty influence upon the character or the destinies of their own, -that in all things they became the advocates of innovation; and with perpetual sneers, directed against the imbecility of the British system, demanded for it the renovation which could be imparted only by the maxims of a more vigorous and enlightened age. Those who recollect any thing of the conduct of the Whigs, at the commencement, and during the progress of the war against revolutionary France, cannot require to be informed, that the constitution of this country suffered deeply in their comparison of it with the brighter creation of an age of reason, and that its disgrace was stamped by that imputed flexibility which rendered it a resistless instrument in the hands of the Legislature in subduing the advocates of a wild system of reform, upon whose liberal endeavours the genius of Whiggism cast for a time an approving smile.

The sympathy thus unhappily excited in the minds of the English Whigs, as they styled themselves, with the domestic transactions of France, and the fleeting forms of liberty which rose and descended in such rapid succession, brought with it a new and very questionable bias as to the whole affairs of French policy. The British government, acting with the all but unanimous approbation of the people, felt it to be its incumbent duty to remonstrate against the alarming novelties of international law, avowed by the early revolutionists of

France, and to repress that infectious enthusiasm at home, which recognized the glories of the French revolution, not merely as an object of distant worship, but a model for practical imitation. A war was the consequence, not courted nor provoked on the part of England, but strenuously urged by the untamed fervour of the new occupants of revolutionary power. Although the insolence of their pretensions, no less than the danger of their example, had been recognised by all but those indulgent spirits, who could pardon every thing to the new-born ardour of freedom, there yet arose a party among us, invincible by its zeal and activity, who looked upon the great struggle that ensued, with a jealous eye, and a heart divided betwixt the claims of patriotism, and the yet holier claims of liberty. The triumphs of their country were beheld with a neutrality of feeling which, if it did not prove that they had become insensible to its prosperity and fame, shewed at all events their conviction, that these objects were to be secured in any other way rather than by success in that contest, which she was waging with her ancient rival, purified and exalted as she had now been by the fires of revolution.

Such unhappy divisions of opinion must distract a free state, in a greater or less degree, in the course of all its wars; but that which was maintained with revolutionary France, having a deeper foundation in irreconcileable principle-presenting more numerous vicissitudes in its progress-and having reached an unexampled duration before the career of strife was finally arrested by victory-than any of the other wars in which this country has been engaged, the domestic resistance to it had inore time to acquire consistency, and to leave a profound impression upon the national mind. The enemies of the war, who were also the avowed admirers of that revolution, by the audacious movements of which Britain had been plunged into the calamity, were furious and unremitting in their declamations against the principle upon which it had been waged, and the leading men by whom it was supported, and endeavoured upon all occasions to inculcate the belief, that this mighty contest had been undertaken by the envious spirit of despotism, to extinguish the liberties of mankind.

The people of England had it incessantly rung in their ears, that the dawn of French freedom had startled the dull vision of tyranny throughout Europe, and that in its impetuosity to quench the offensive stream of light, it had not scrupled to decree the sacrifice of millions of human beings, and the desolation of the world. The extensive combination of Power which a common sense of danger created in the outset, although it could not preserve it amidst disaster and defeat, was invidiously represented as an odious phalanx of despotism, formed to crush the hopes of the species; and when in British government, assailed by a novel and appalling danger from abroad, endeavoured, by successive efforts of policy, to reconstruct the shattered alliance which false terror alone had dissolved, it was absurdly charged with abetting the cause of oppression, and rendered responsible for the errors and abuses of the old governments of the Continent, as if they had been its dependents, not its allies. The unremitting efforts of faction thus endeavoured, and in part succeeded, in stamping upon the late war-the most just and the most necessary ever undertaken by a free state,-a character utterly odious and detestable; and those who unhappily were made converts to this doctrine, were left to brood in sorrow and anger over a picture the most revolting to the heart, the unparalleled sacrifice of human life, and of national resources, to the devouring and insatiable spirit of despotism.

The real character of the enemy, and of the contest, gradually developed itself, indeed, in a form too palpable and terrific for the sophistry of Opposition any longer to contend with it. But they had still a resource left,- -a resource of which they did not scruple to avail themselves in their extremity, and which was well calculated to sustain that deep dissatisfaction with the measures of government, which they had long been insinuating among the people. It was the war, they said, which had created the tyranny that rose out of the overthrow of freedom; it was the haughty and frantic resistance made to the infant liberties of the French people,-the insulting interference in their domestic arrangements: It was the thunder hurled against it by the banded ty

rants of Christendom, which had blasted the precious sapling of their liberty, and filled them with frenzy at the sight. Some of the more intrepid of the party, faithful to the maxims which had prompted their early execration of the anti-revolutionary war, disdained to acknowledge any change of opinion even amidst the progress of events-and saw, in the despotism of Buonaparte himself, only the consummation of the sacred principle which acknowledges as legitimate that sceptre alone that is snatched out of the wreck of revolutions. His title to the character of a legitimate Prince, was established in their opinion by the fact of his triumphant progress through anarchy and blood-and the popular voice calling him to the throne, was audible to his English admirers in the groans of the people upon whom he cruelly trampled, or intelligible in the silence which the sanguinary terrors of his name had inspired. Whatever were the crimes which he committed, they had an apology in readiness to extenuate his guilt, the subtile varnish of the pseudo-whiggism of England was ever copiously applied to the rude surface of imperial despotism. And even in the last stages of the conflict, when towering ambition thought it might dispense with the mask of moderation, or, exasperated by interminable resistance, abandoned itself to headlong fury and defiance-when the supremacy of France, the annihilation of England, the servitude of Europe, was ostentatiously decreed,-when tyranny had lost its cunning, and taking its stand on the precipice of power alone, was hastening to destruction, its English advocates were still labouring in its vindication and in their injurious comparisons of the government of their own country with that of its mortal and maddened foe, could find no other distinction but that which marks the imbecility and the energy of despotism.

The doctrines thus promulgated by a part, at least, of the English Whigs, for a long course of years, with an impassioned zeal rising in proportion to the number of disappointments which their ambition was fated to sustain, could not be wholly without effect upon the national mind. The seed thus abundantly sown, was too well adapted to the light soil of vulgar prejudice not to produce, in due season, a cor

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responding harvest. It was not unnatural, indeed, that the war, which was not founded upon any base principle of national cupidity, and promised no gratification to the spirit of territorial aggrandizement, a war, supported on the sacred principle of conversation alone, and undertaken to save the world from horrors, of which, as it had never suffered from the sad experience, so it could not be expected to form the most impartial estimate,-should be misrepresented, denounced and reviled. The expenditure required was immense, the exertion demanded was palpable to the most vulgar calculation; but the object, which was of a high moral character, was less perceptible, or, at all events, less impressive upon a common mind. In the career of declamation, therefore, the opponents of the war had a striking advantage over its supporters, and while the latter made an appeal to higher principles, of which the justice was conspicuously developed only after anarchy had become frantic in the intoxication of success, those who opC posed hostilities at every step, from their necessary commencement to their splendid termination, had ever at hand some vulgar topic of clamour and triumphant theme of vituperation, and could easily, in the near pressure of a decaying trade, or the intense exactions of finance, drown the still small voice of reason, demanding, at every hazard, the salvation of the country from an abyss, which had opened to absorb, not it's wealth only, but its independence and honour,-to sweep away all that is sacred to the proudest recollections, and indissolubly bound up with the highest hopes of the British people.

J

The events which occurred in the progress of the contest, gave occasional countenance to the malignant theory of its being a war of oppression against freedom, so well adapted to exasperate the discontents of the unreflecting classes of society. England had to seek her allies indifferently among the continental governments, regardless of their domestic economy, provided they could infuse strength into the great system of defensive combination. Some of the States, which it was her clear and imperative policy to put in motion for the general defence, had but imperfectly awoke from the sleep of barbarism, and presented, in their internal structure, a fantastic

VOL. VI.

combination of the wreck of the feudal system with the fragments of priestly domination. Such an exhibition must ever have appeared hideous to a British government, to which it stands in palpable contrast; but the English ministers justly remembered, that their office, at that critical moment, was to combine the different powers in a system externally vigorous, not to renovate their internal economy,-that the danger which was imminent to England, and which, therefore, it was their duty to avert, arose not from the tranquil impotence of old despotisms, but the turbulent energy of a new power, threatening all nations with one common ruin. They were aware also, that even the most abject of the old tyrannies formed an integral part of the European system, and must, at no remote period, share in that gradual process of renovation which was going forward throughout the world, and which, as it was indissolubly associated with the temperate triumphs of reason, could in no way be so surely arrested, as by that spirit of anarchy which it was their object to quell. Theirs was essentially a system of conversation; that of their enemy a course of destruction. While the British government, therefore, was compelled by the urgency of the crisis to preserve, rather than to correct, and to abstain from altering what it could not but condemn, its impetuous enemies stood in a far different situation. Every thing actually established, formed an obstacle to their course of unsparing revolution; the good and the evil were equally blended by them in impartial destruction; and while the Imperial despot, in whom all that remained of the energy of the new system was finally concentrated, waged war upon all nations, and desolated the entire face of Europe, he could easily afford to the spirit of freedom the abolition of Polish servitude, or to the spirit of humanity the overthrow of the Inquisition in Spain, the more especially as the destruction of all intermediate power, whether liberal or oppressive, was in the very spirit of his despotism, which could suffer nothing to exist that might interrupt its descending frown, or break in upon the amplitude and integrity of its domination. It was at small cost therefore to the execution of his own mighty projects, that he threw out to

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