r plate to the mint,
in order to obtain money to go to market. Then something may be
attributed to the institutions, without disparaging a people's honesty.
Our institutions are popular, just as those of France are the reverse;
and the people, they who were on the spot--the home creditor, with his
account unpaid, and with his friends and relatives in the legislature,
and present to aid him, contended for his own money, before any should
be sent abroad."

"Was that exactly right, sir?"

"Certainly not; it was exactly wrong, but very particularly natural. Do
you suppose the King of France would not take the money for his civil
list, if circumstances should compel the country to suspend on the debt
for a year or two, or the ministers their salaries? My word for it, each
and all of them would prefer themselves as creditors, and act
accordingly. Every one of these countries has suspended in some form or
other, and in many instances balanced the account with the sponge. Their
clamour against us is altogether calculated with a view to political
effect."

"Still, I wish Pennsylvania, for instance, had continued to pay, at
every hazard."

"It is well enough to wish, Hugh; but it is wishing for an
impossibility. Then you and I, as New Yorkers, have nothing to do with
the debt of Pennsylvania, no more than London would have to do with the
debt of Dublin or Quebec. _We_ have always paid _our_ interest, and,
what is more, paid it more honestly, if honesty be the point, than even
England has paid hers. When _our_ banks suspended, the State paid its
interest in as much paper as would buy the specie in open market;
whereas England made paper legal tender, and paid the interest on her
debt in it for something like five-and-twenty years, and, that, too,
when her paper was at a large discount. I knew of one American who held
near a million of dollars in the English debt, on which he had to take
unconvertible paper for the interest for a long series of years. No, no!
this is all gammon, Hugh, and is not to be regarded as making us a whit
worse than our neighbours. The equality of our laws is the fact in
which I glory!"

"If the rich stood as fair a chance as the poor, uncle Ro."

"There _is_ a screw loose there, I must confess; but it amounts to no
great matter."

"Then the late bankrupt law?"

"Ay, that was an infernal procedure--that much I will acknowledge, too.
It was special legislation enacted to pay particular debts, and