the bank
notes in which the interest is paid, a circumstance always liable to
happen.

One of the amusements that has kept up the farce of the funding system
is, that the interest is regularly paid. But as the interest is always
paid in bank notes, and as bank notes can always be coined for the
purpose, this mode of payment proves nothing. The point of proof is, can
the bank give cash for the bank notes with which the interest is paid?
If it cannot, and it is evident it cannot, some millions of bank notes
must go without payment, and those holders of bank notes who apply last
will be worst off. When the present quantity of cash in the bank is paid
away, it is next to impossible to see how any new quantity is to arrive.
None will arrive from taxes, for the taxes will all be paid in bank
notes; and should the government refuse bank notes in payment of taxes,
the credit of bank notes will be gone at once. No cash will arise from
the business of discounting merchants' bills; for every merchant will
pay off those bills in bank notes, and not in cash. There is therefore
no means left for the bank to obtain a new supply of cash, after the
present quantity is paid away. But besides the impossibility of paying
the interest of the funded debt in cash, there are many thousand
persons, in London and in the country, who are holders of bank notes
that came into their hands in the fair way of trade, and who are not
stockholders in the funds; and as such persons have had no hand in
increasing the demand upon the bank, as those have had who for their own
private interest, like Boyd and others, are contracting or pretending to
contract for new loans, they will conceive they have a just right that
their bank notes should be paid first. Boyd has been very sly in France,
in changing his paper into cash. He will be just as sly in doing the
same thing in London, for he has learned to calculate; and then it is
probable he will set off for America.

A stoppage of payment at the bank is not a new thing. Smith in his
Wealth of Nations, book ii. chap. 2, says, that in the year 1696,
exchequer bills fell forty, fifty, and sixty per cent; bank notes twenty
per cent; and the bank stopped payment. That which happened in 1696 may
happen again in 1796. The period in which it happened was the last year
of the war of King William. It necessarily put a stop to the further
emissions of exchequer and navy bills, and to the raising of new loans;
and the pea