h a debt of a hundred and forty millions. Soon however the wars
which sprang from the French Revolution, and which far exceeded in cost
any that the world had ever seen, tasked the powers of public credit to
the utmost. When the world was again at rest the funded debt of England
amounted to eight hundred millions. If the most enlightened man had been
told, in 1792, that, in 1815, the interest on eight hundred millions
would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of
belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession
of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. It was in truth
a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of
despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found
to have been as unreasonable as ever. After a few years of exhaustion,
England recovered herself. Yet, like Addison's valetudinarian, who
continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so
fat that he was shamed into silence, she went on complaining that she
was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which made
her complaints ridiculous. The beggared, the bankrupt society not
only proved able to meet all its obligations, but, while meeting those
obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost
be discerned by the eye. In every county, we saw wastes recently turned
into gardens; in every city, we saw new streets, and squares, and
markets, more brilliant lamps, more abundant supplies of water; in the
suburbs of every great seat of industry, we saw villas multiplying fast,
each embosomed in its gay little paradise of lilacs and roses. While
shallow politicians were repeating that the energies of the people were
borne down by the weight of the public burdens, the first journey was
performed by steam on a railway. Soon the island was intersected by
railways. A sum exceeding the whole amount of the national debt at the
end of the American war was, in a few years, voluntarily expended by
this ruined people in viaducts, tunnels, embankments, bridges, stations,
engines. Meanwhile taxation was almost constantly becoming lighter
and lighter; yet still the Exchequer was full. It may be now affirmed
without fear of contradiction that we find it as easy to pay the
interest of eight hundred millions as our ancestors found it, a century
ago, to pay the interest of eighty millions.

It can hardly be doubted that