on paid heavy taxes for the purpose of carrying them
out--taxes paid for nothing better than the success of a practical
hoax.

The round hundreds of millions in which our national debt is set forth
seem to have often confused the brains of our most practical
arithmeticians and financiers. They seem to have felt as if these did
not represent real money, but something ideal; or perhaps we might
say, they have treated them like certain results of the operation of
figures which might be neutralised by others, as the equivalents on
the two sides of an equation exhaust each other. We never hear of a
man trying to pay his own personal debts otherwise than with money,
but we have had hundreds of projects for paying the national debt
without money, and generally through some curious and ingenious
arithmetical process. We might perhaps amuse our readers by an account
of some of these, for to their absurdity there are no bounds; but we
adhere in the meantime to our engagement, to shew that on this subject
even the practical projects of statesmen of our own day have been
ridiculous.

We shall suppose that some one has occasion for L.100, which he finds
a friend obliging enough to lend him. On receiving it, he requests the
loan of other L.10; and being asked for what purpose, he answers, that
with that L.10 he will pay up the original L.100. This is a rather
startling proposal; but when he is asked how he is to manage this
practical paradox, he says: 'Oh, I shall put out the L.10 to interest,
and in the course of time it will increase until it pays off the
L.100.' The lender is perhaps a little staggered at first by the
audacious plausibility of the proposal, but it requires but a few
seconds to enable him to say: 'Why, yes, you may lend out the L.10 at
interest; but in the meantime, as you have borrowed it, interest runs
against you upon it; so what better are you?' The lender, so far from
concurring with the sanguine hopes about the fructification of the
L.10, will only regret his having intrusted the larger sum to a person
whose notions of money are so loose and preposterous.

Yet the proposal would only have carried into private pecuniary
matters the principle of the sinking-fund, so long deemed a blessing,
and a source of future prosperity to the country. A sinking-fund is an
expression generally applied to any sum of money reserved out of
expenditure to pay debt, or meet any contingency. Now, observe that
our remarks are n