etter ten
times over, until you understand every word of it. And if you do that,
you will laugh at the parson and tax-gatherer's coaxings about Savings
Banks. You will keep your odd pennies to yourself; or lay them out in
bread or bacon.

You have heard, I daresay, a great deal about the national debt; and
now I will tell you what this thing is, and how it came, and then you
will see what an imposture it is, and how shamefully the people of
England have been duped and robbed.

The Boroughmongers having usurped all the powers of government, and
having begun to pocket the public money at a great rate, the people
grew discontented. They began to think that they had done wrong in
driving King James away. In a pretty little fable-book, there is a
fable which says that the frogs, who had a log of wood for king,
prayed to Jupiter to send them something more active. He sent them a
stork, or heron, which gobbled them up alive by scores! The people of
England found in the Boroughmongers what the poor frogs found in the
stork; and they began to cry out against them and to wish for the old
king back again.

The Boroughmongers saw their danger, and they adopted measures to
prevent it. They saw that if they could make it the interest of a
great many rich people to uphold them and their system they should be
able to get along. They therefore passed a law to enable themselves to
borrow money of rich people; and by the same law they imposed it on
the people at large to pay, for ever, the interest of the money so by
them borrowed.

The money which they thus borrowed they spent in wars, or divided
amongst themselves, in one shape or another. Indeed the money spent in
wars was pocketed, for the greater part, by themselves. Thus they
owed, in time, immense sums of money; and as they continued to pass
laws to compel the nation at large to pay the interest of what they
borrowed, spent and pocketed, they called and still call this debt,
the debt of the nation; or, in the usual words, the national debt.

It is curious to observe that there has seldom been known in the world
any very wicked and mischievous scheme of which a priest of some
description or other was not at the bottom. This scheme, certainly as
wicked in itself as any that was ever known, and far more mischievous
in its consequences than any other, was the offspring of a Bishop of
Salisbury, whose name was Burnet; a name that we ought to teach our
very children to execrate. T