dividends of joint stock companies.

Still, however, the estimated revenue was not equal to the estimated
expenditure. The year 1692 had bequeathed a large deficit to the year
1693; and it seemed probable that the charge for 1693 would exceed by
about five hundred thousand pounds the charge for 1692. More than two
millions had been voted for the army and ordnance, near two millions for
the navy. [367] Only eight years before fourteen hundred thousand pounds
had defrayed the whole annual charge of government. More than four times
that sum was now required. Taxation, both direct and indirect, had been
carried to an unprecedented point; yet the income of the state still
fell short of the outlay by about a million. It was necessary to devise
something. Something was devised, something of which the effects are
felt to this day in every part of the globe.

There was indeed nothing strange or mysterious in the expedient to which
the government had recourse. It was an expedient familiar, during two
centuries, to the financiers of the Continent, and could hardly fail to
occur to any English statesman who compared the void in the Exchequer
with the overflow in the money market.

During the interval between the Restoration and the Revolution the
riches of the nation had been rapidly increasing. Thousands of busy
men found every Christmas that, after the expenses of the year's
housekeeping had been defrayed out of the year's income, a surplus
remained; and how that surplus was to be employed was a question of some
difficulty. In our time, to invest such a surplus, at something more
than three per cent., on the best security that has ever been known in
the world, is the work of a few minutes. But in the seventeenth century
a lawyer, a physician, a retired merchant, who had saved some thousands
and who wished to place them safely and profitably, was often greatly
embarrassed. Three generations earlier, a man who had accumulated wealth
in a profession generally purchased real property or lent his savings on
mortgage. But the number of acres in the kingdom had remained the same;
and the value of those acres, though it had greatly increased, had by no
means increased so fast as the quantity of capital which was seeking for
employment. Many too wished to put their money where they could find it
at an hour's notice, and looked about for some species of property which
could be more readily transferred than a house or a field. A capitalis