t was impossible to prove by figures that
the road to Paradise did not lie through the Holy Land; but it was
possible to prove by figures that the road to national ruin was through
the national debt. It was idle, however, now to talk about the road; we
had done with the road; we had reached the goal; all was over; all
the revenues of the island north of Trent and west of Reading were
mortgaged. Better for us to have been conquered by Prussia or Austria
than to be saddled with the interest of a hundred and forty millions.
[370] And yet this great philosopher--for such he was--had only to open
his eyes, and to see improvement all around him, cities increasing,
cultivation extending, marts too small for the crowd of buyers and
sellers, harbours insufficient to contain the shipping, artificial
rivers joining the chief inland seats of industry to the chief seaports,
streets better lighted, houses better furnished, richer wares exposed to
sale in statelier shops, swifter carriages rolling along smoother roads.
He had, indeed, only to compare the Edinburgh of his boyhood with
the Edinburgh of his old age. His prediction remains to posterity, a
memorable instance of the weakness from which the strongest minds
are not exempt. Adam Smith saw a little and but a little further.
He admitted that, immense as the burden was, the nation did actually
sustain it and thrive under it in a way which nobody could have
foreseen. But he warned his countrymen not to repeat so hazardous an
experiment. The limit had been reached. Even a small increase might
be fatal. [371] Not less gloomy was the view which George Grenville,
a minister eminently diligent and practical, took of our financial
situation. The nation must, he conceived, sink under a debt of a hundred
and forty millions, unless a portion of the load were borne by the
American colonies. The attempt to lay a portion of the load on the
American colonies produced another war. That war left us with an
additional hundred millions of debt, and without the colonies whose help
had been represented as indispensable. Again England was given over;
and again the strange patient persisted in becoming stronger and more
blooming in spite of all the diagnostics and prognostics of State
physicians. As she had been visibly more prosperous with a debt of a
hundred and forty millions than with a debt of fifty millions, so she,
as visibly more prosperous with a debt of two hundred and forty millions
than wit