which it is impossible to
prevent while the quantity of that money and of bank notes continues to
multiply. What else but this can account for the difference between one
war costing 21 millions, and another war costing 160 millions?

The difference cannot be accounted for on the score of extraordinary
efforts or extraordinary achievements. The war that cost twenty-one
millions was the war of the con-federates, historically called the grand
alliance, consisting of England, Austria, and Holland in the time of
William III. against Louis XIV. and in which the confederates were
victorious. The present is a war of a much greater confederacy--a
confederacy of England, Austria, Prussia, the German Empire, Spain,
Holland, Naples, and Sardinia, eight powers, against the French Republic
singly, and the Republic has beaten the whole confederacy.--But to
return to my subject.

It is said in England, that the value of paper keeps equal with the
value of gold and silver. But the case is not rightly stated; for the
fact is, that the paper has _pulled down_ the value of gold and silver
to a level with itself. Gold and silver will not purchase so much of any
purchasable article at this day as if no paper had appeared, nor so much
as it will in any country in Europe where there is no paper. How long
this hanging together of money and paper will continue, makes a new
case; because it daily exposes the system to sudden death, independent
of the natural death it would otherwise suffer.

I consider the funding system as being now advanced into the last twenty
years of its existence. The single circumstance, were there no other,
that a war should now cost nominally one hundred and sixty millions,
which when the system began cost but twenty-one millions, or that the
loan for one year only (including the loan to the Emperor) should now be
nominally greater than the whole expense of that war, shows the state of
depreciation to which the funding system has arrived. Its depreciation
is in the proportion of eight for one, compared with the value of its
money when the system began; which is the state the French assignats
stood a year ago (March 1795) compared with gold and silver. It is
therefore that I say, that the English funding system has entered on the
last twenty years of its existence, comparing each twenty years of
the English system with every single year of the American and French
systems, as before stated.

Again, supposing the prese