Necker receives a sort of friendly reprimand
from the president of the Assembly.
As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to say
anything of them with certainty, because they have not yet had their
operation; but nobody is so sanguine as to imagine they will fill up
any perceptible part of the wide gaping breach which their
incapacity had made in their revenues. At present the state of their
treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and
more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is
now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want,
the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our
flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not
the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the
solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of
power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in
England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is
received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash
actually deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an
instant and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is
of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful
on 'Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment
of a debt of twenty shillings, a creditor may refuse all the paper
of the Bank of England.
Pages:
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364