ad been, and confined
within the country as paper money always is, by having no circulation
out of it; or, to speak on a larger scale, the same thing would happen
in the world, could the world be glutted with gold and silver, as
America and France have been with paper.

The English system differs from that of America and France in this one
particular, that its capital is kept out of sight; that is, it does
not appear in circulation. Were the whole capital of the national debt,
which at the time I write this is almost one hundred million pounds
sterling, to be emitted in assignats or bills, and that whole quantity
put into circulation, as was done in America and in France, those
English assignats, or bills, would soon sink in value as those of
America and France have done; and that in a greater degree, because
the quantity of them would be more disproportioned to the quantity
of population in England, than was the case in either of the other two
countries. A nominal pound sterling in such bills would not be worth one
penny.

But though the English system, by thus keeping the capital out of sight,
is preserved from hasty destruction, as in the case of America and
France, it nevertheless approaches the same fate, and will arrive at it
with the same certainty, though by a slower progress. The difference
is altogether in the degree of speed by which the two systems approach
their fate, which, to speak in round numbers, is as twenty is to one;
that is, the English system, that of funding the capital instead of
issuing it, contained within itself a capacity of enduring twenty times
longer than the systems adopted by America and France; and at the end of
that time it would arrive at the same common grave, the Potter's Field
of paper money.

The datum, I take for this proportion of twenty to one, is the
difference between a capital and the interest at five per cent. Twenty
times the interest is equal to the capital. The accumulation of paper
money in England is in proportion to the accumulation of the interest
upon every new loan; and therefore the progress to the dissolution is
twenty times slower than if the capital were to be emitted and put into
circulation immediately. Every twenty years in the English system is
equal to one year in the French and American systems.

Having thus stated the duration of the two systems, that of funding upon
interest, and that of emitting the whole capital without funding, to be
as twenty