e funding system not to break up; for the loans of the last year and
of the present year are twenty-two millions each, which exceeds the
ratio compared with the loans of the preceding war. It will not be from
the inability of procuring loans that the system will break up. On
the contrary, it is the facility with which loans can be procured that
hastens that event. The loans are altogether paper transactions; and
it is the excess of them that brings on, with accelerating speed, that
progressive depreciation of funded paper money that will dissolve the
funding system.

I proceed to ascertain the expense of future wars, and I do this merely
to show the impossibility of the continuance of the funding system, and
the certainty of its dissolution.

The expense of the next war after the present war, according to the
ratio that has ascertained the preceding cases, will be 243 millions.

Expense of the second war 364

---------------- third war 546

---------------- fourth war 819

-------- fifth war 1228

3200 millions;

which, at only four per cent. will require taxes to the nominal amount
of one hundred and twenty-eight millions to pay the annual interest,
besides the interest of the present debt, and the expenses of
government, which are not included in this account. Is there a man so
mad, so stupid, as to sup-pose this system can continue?

When I first conceived the idea of seeking for some common ratio that
should apply as a rule of measurement to all the cases of the funding
system, so far as to ascertain the several stages of its approach to
dissolution, I had no expectation that any ratio could be found that
would apply with so much exactness as this does. I was led to the idea
merely by observing that the funding system was a thing in continual
progression, and that whatever was in a state of progression might be
supposed to admit of, at least, some general ratio of measurement,
that would apply without any very great variation. But who could have
supposed that falling systems, or falling opinions, admitted of a ratio
apparently as true as the descent of falling bodies? I have not made the
ratio any more than Newton made the ratio of gravitation. I have only
discovered it, and explained the mode of applying it.

To shew at one view the rapid progression of the funding system to
destruction, and to expose the folly of those who blindly believe in
its c