ce which took place the next year was probably hurried on by
this circumstance, and saved the bank from bankruptcy. Smith in speaking
from the circumstances of the bank, upon another occasion, says (book
ii. chap. 2.) "This great company had been reduced to the necessity
of paying in sixpences." When a bank adopts the expedient of paying in
sixpences, it is a confession of insolvency.

It is worthy of observation, that every case of failure in finances,
since the system of paper began, has produced a revolution in
governments, either total or partial. A failure in the finances of
France produced the French revolution. A failure in the finance of
the assignats broke up the revolutionary government, and produced
the present French Constitution. A failure in the finances of the Old
Congress of America, and the embarrassments it brought upon commerce,
broke up the system of the old confederation, and produced the federal
Constitution. If, then, we admit of reasoning by comparison of causes
and events, the failure of the English finances will produce some change
in the government of that country.

As to Mr. Pitt's project of paying off the national debt by applying
a million a-year for that purpose, while he continues adding more than
twenty millions a-year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg
to run after a hare. The longer he runs the farther he is off.

When I said that the funding system had entered the last twenty years
of its existence, I certainly did not mean that it would continue twenty
years, and then expire as a lease would do. I meant to describe that
age of decrepitude in which death is every day to be expected, and life
cannot continue long. But the death of credit, or that state that is
called bankruptcy, is not always marked by those progressive stages
of visible decline that marked the decline of natural life. In the
progression of natural life age cannot counterfeit youth, nor conceal
the departure of juvenile abilities. But it is otherwise with respect
to the death of credit; for though all the approaches to bankruptcy
may actually exist in circumstances, they admit of being concealed by
appearances. Nothing is more common than to see the bankrupt of to-day a
man in credit but the day before; yet no sooner is the real state of
his affairs known, than every body can see he had been insolvent long
before. In London, the greatest theatre of bankruptcy in Europe, this
part of the subject will b