therefore the quantity of gold and silver, and of bank notes, taken
together, amounts to eighty millions. The quantity of gold and silver,
as stated by Lord Hawkes-bury's Secretary, George Chalmers, as I have
before shown, is twenty millions; and, therefore, the total amount
of bank notes in circulation, all made payable on demand, is sixty
millions. This enormous sum will astonish the most stupid stock-jobber,
and overpower the credulity of the most thoughtless Englishman: but were
it only a third part of that sum, the bank cannot pay half a crown in
the pound.

There is something curious in the movements of this modern complicated
machine, the funding system; and it is only now that it is beginning
to unfold the full extent of its movements. In the first part of its
movements it gives great powers into the hands of government, and in the
last part it takes them completely away.

The funding system set out with raising revenues under the name of
loans, by means of which government became both prodigal and powerful.
The loaners assumed the name of creditors, and though it was soon
discovered that loaning was government-jobbing, those pretended loaners,
or the persons who purchased into the funds afterwards, conceived
themselves not only to be creditors, but to be the _only_ creditors.

But such has been the operation of this complicated machine, the funding
system, that it has produced, unperceived, a second generation of
creditors, more numerous and far more formidable and withal more
real than the first generation; for every holder of a bank note is a
creditor, and a real creditor, and the debt due to him is made payable
on demand. The debt therefore which the government owes to individuals
is composed of two parts; the one about four hundred millions bearing
interest, the other about sixty millions payable on demand. The one is
called the funded debt, the other is the debt due in bank notes.

The second debt (that contained in the bank notes) has, in a great
measure, been incurred to pay the interest of the first debt; so that in
fact little or no real interest has been paid by government. The whole
has been delusion and fraud. Government first contracted a debt, in the
form of loans, with one class of people, and then run clandestinely into
debt with another class, by means of bank notes, to pay the interest.
Government acted of itself in contracting the first debt, and made a
machine of the bank to contract the