e well and feelingly understood.

Mr. Pitt continually talks of credit, and the national resources. These
are two of the feigned appearances by which the approaches to bankruptcy
are concealed. That which he calls credit may exist, as I have just
shown, in a state of insolvency, and is always what I have before
described it to be, _suspicion asleep_.

As to national resources, Mr. Pitt, like all English financiers that
preceded him since the funding system began, has uniformly mistaken the
nature of a resource; that is, they have mistaken it consistently with
the delusion of the funding system; but time is explaining the delusion.
That which he calls, and which they call, a resource, is not a resource,
but is the _anticipation_ of a resource. They have anticipated what
_would have been_ a resource in another generation, had not the use of
it been so anticipated. The funding system is a system of anticipation.
Those who established it an hundred years ago anticipated the resources
of those who were to live an hundred years after; for the people of the
present day have to pay the interest of the debts contracted at that
time, and all debts contracted since. But it is the last feather that
breaks the horse's back. Had the system begun an hundred years before,
the amount of taxes at this time to pay the annual interest at four per
cent. (could we suppose such a system of insanity could have continued)
would be two hundred and twenty millions annually: for the capital of
the debt would be 5486 millions, according to the ratio that ascertains
the expense of the wars for the hundred years that are past. But long
before it could have reached this period, the value of bank notes,
from the immense quantity of them, (for it is in paper only that such
a nominal revenue could be collected,) would have been as low or lower
than continental paper has been in America, or assignats in France; and
as to the idea of exchanging them for gold and silver, it is too absurd
to be contradicted.

Do we not see that nature, in all her operations, disowns the visionary
basis upon which the funding system is built? She acts always by
renewed successions, and never by accumulating additions perpetually
progressing. Animals and vegetables, men and trees, have existed since
the world began: but that existence has been carried on by succession
of generations, and not by continuing the same men and the same trees in
existence that existed first; and t