succeeding reigns down to the time of Mary, inclusively. In examining the events of this interval, we shall find perpetually recurring proofs of the most complete ignorance, on the part of the government, of commercial and financial principles; and we shall further discover that the supplies for the state were usually obtained by illegal extortion, and seldom according to any regular system of taxation. In this interval it was that the first tax on property commenced. The first tenth, called Saladin tithe, was also levied in this period, having been exacted in the reign of Henry II. The first charter to merchants, the first duty on tonnage and poundage, and the first tariff on goods, were imposed by Edward I. He was the first also to cause the church to contribute to the revenues of the state. Edward III. first received, as a grant from parliament, the poll tax, 4d. per head. The income tax was granted to Henry IV. on the express condition that it should be concealed from posterity as an impost of monstrous birth. In the reign of Henry VI. a proposal for seizing church property was renewed, and the principle of gradation in the imposition of taxes was introduced. Large sums were accumulated by the extortion and parsimony of Henry VII. Henry VIII., by confiscating the church property, largely increased the revenue.

During the second period of English history, that which intervened between the accession of Elizabeth and the Revolution of 1688, many important changes had taken place. The government of Elizabeth restored the standard of the coin, and they paid off the debt. The Commons began then to play an important part in the management of the revenue. In this period the poor laws were introduced, the lottery established, the Bill of Rights was obtained, a regular financial system was created, and the land tax, customs, and excise, placed under permanent regulations.

We now arrive at the third period of the history, that which is included between the date of the accession of William III. and the peace of Paris in 1815. When William ascended the throne, the kingdom was in a very thriving condition. Population had greatly increased; trade and commerce were flourishing; but the revenue was small, compared with the royal demand, and this rendered it necessary for the king to have recourse to all sorts of new taxes. The malt tax, the hackney-coach, and that on hawkers and pedlars, were now introduced. William imported from the continent the borrowing system, and the amount of loans which he contracted was twelve millions; and the total revenue, including the loans of the twelve years of his reign, mounted up to seventy-two millions. The aggregate revenue during the reign of Anne, which only lasted twelve years, was upwards of sixty-two millions-but her loans, constituting the burden for which posterity was to be responsible, amounted to nearly sixty millions more-so that, in effect, the expenditure of this queen was, upon the whole, somewhat about one hundred and twenty millions. But then, this was the price of

;

the victories of Marlborough. We could now boast of Blenheim but when we consider calmly the principles which we asserted by sending our troops to the continent in the era of Queen Anne, we shall find what little justification there was for so extravagant an expenditure. In the reign of George I. no less than nearly eighty millions were raised for the revenue. But George was a comparatively moderate man; he gave up the war game, he remained at home, contracted his expenses, and contrived to pay off about forty millions of the nation's debt. During all these times, the absolute current expenses of the country rarely exceeded three millions a year. It would have been well for the country that George II., in inheriting the crown, had also succeeded to the good sense and temper of his father. He preferred warfare to peace, and increased the burdens of the people. During the thirty-three years of his reign, no less than two hundred and seventy-six millions were raised, of which fifty-nine millions were left by the good king to be supplied by posterity. The civil list and the king's expenses alone took twenty-seven millions of this money; and the enormous expenditure, which now strikes us with surprise, of this king was incurred by a series of wars, which were carried on in defiance of the feelings and judgment of the nation.

It is truly observed by the author, that the greatest financial era, not merely of England, but of the civilized world, arises in the era of George III. We shall begin by an extract from the work, which is of the highest curiosity as connected with the financial machinery of this celebrated reign:

It would be difficult to relate the various plans and contrivances by which Pitt, and his fanatic scholars, augmented all branches of the revenue, during this period; they were as numerous as they were extraordinary. But such a narration, far from conveying a distinct knowledge, would only confuse the reader. The sums are so vast, that simple assertions would appear paradoxical or erroneous, did not authentic documents exhibit to demonstration the increase, progress, and wonderfully high point of elevation reached by the principal branches of the public income. The reader will observe that, in 1798, the produce of the assessed taxes was trebled; that on the 3d of April of the same year, Pitt proposed his plan of redeeming the land-tax; and on the 3d of December, 1799, carried the motion of the income-tax. It will be seen, by inspection, that the customs, at the accession of George III., produced £1,960,000: in 1804, above seven millions; three years afterwards, exceeded nine millions and a half; and at the conclusion of the war (1815) reached their highest point, £10,960,775. The land-tax, in 1790, produced £3,600,000; in 1804, yielded £5,300,000; three years later, £6,900,000; and at the end of the war reached £7,543,865. The stamps, which in 1790 produced £263,207, in 1804 rendered £3,170,000; in the three following years, £4,132,000; and at the conclusion of the war, £5,601,791. The post-office experienced even a greater proportionate increase, the returns being, in 1760, £83,493 ; and, in 1815, £1,541,000. Lastly, the excise, which produced £3,837,000, at George's accession, yielded, in 1804, £17,900,000: three y ears later,

above £23,000,000; and, in the last year of the war, £26,537,633!!— while the property-tax reached nearly £12,000,000. The net public revenue, in the first year of George's reign, amounted to £8,800.000; in 1703, reached £17,600,000; in 1808, 61,500,000; and, at the end of the war, £76,833,494! The total aggregate net amount produced by all branches of the revenue, from the accession of George III. to the close of the war in 1815, was £1,386,268,446!!!

Such was the prodigious sum raised during this extraordinary period— a sum three times greater than all the stock of gold and silver existing in the world in 1809, the epoch of the greatest known abundance of those metals. * Such an enormous amount of treasure was never before imagined: such amazing increase of taxation never before recorded in history. Had these immense sums been sufficient to meet the expenses incurred by Pitt, and the ministers who ruled the nation during this period, posterity would be merely astonished that there was a people capable of supporting such prodigious burdens, and suffering such enormous exactions. But it was far otherwise: they fell infinitely short of the expenditure. It was not enough for Pitt and his successors to torture and oppress their own generation; they wrested from Parliament the dangerous power of drawing bills upon posterity, like a prodigal son drawing upon his father's banker. They contracted debts, and added loans to loans at the lowest interest; adding (as we shall shew in the proper place) the unparalled sum of 531 millions to the immense amount already noticed; the whole constituting a grand total of £1,917,637,587!! Truly, North, Pitt, and Castlereagh, were wonderful men: George III., that good man, but inflexible king, certainly possessed extraordinary ministries. pp. 68-71.

How all these sums were lavished, it would be tedious to tell: but the melancholy history of the details will be found in the records of the French and American wars into which England was so unhappily inveigled.

Pitt's death did not stop the tide of extravagance. He had worthy successors in Percival and Castlereagh, who in nothing improved more than in the spirit of licentiousness so characteristic of their predecessor. Under the auspices of these ministers, fresh continental coalitions were formed; in short, all Europe was united, and its armies nearly all subsidised, by English gold. It is shown by our author, from official documents, that in 1812 England had nearly one million of fighting men in her pay; in 1814 she expended a sum of one hundred and fourteen millions. All this expenditure was required for the purpose of transporting Napoleon to Elba; but his return rendered the whole of the expense perfectly nugatory, and a new-being the sixth, and we hope the last-coalition was formed by England, in which again she marched the armies of Europe into France. Upon the whole, we find that the mere attempt of England to restore the Bourbons to the throne of France,

* Calculated by Jacob at 380 millions, by Humboldt at 325 millions, and by Storch at 220 millions.

stands an item in the national ledger to the tune of one thousand millions sterling!

But we have only spoken of the expense of the wars-what did royalty cost in the mean time, is a question which, with great respect for our ancient institutions, we may very reasonably ask, even in the present era. Burke's efforts in 1780 produced a very trifling saving in the civil list; and the fact is not to be disputed, that the sum appropriated to the royal family from the time of George the Third's accession to the year 1815, amounted to fiftyeight millions of money. It is true, likewise, that whilst between 1760 and 1815 no less than 12,000,600l. were paid in annuities to the members of the royal family, no more than 80,000l. were paid during forty-seven years for useful discoveries. Wellington received a million nearly in six years; the same general expended a vast sum of money in building a line of fortresses, with the view of curbing French ambition, which said fortresses were ordered to be demolished the other day.

It is not necessary to proceed farther in illustrating the enormous folly, or rather the guilt, which is manifested in the course of the national extravagance here detailed; we shall therefore proceed to the consideration of the second part of this work, or that extended and elaborate history of the funding system, which the author, with extraordinary diligence, has compiled.

In former times, there were loans obtained by the government; but these were for only short periods, and they were always negociated on this principle, that the funds assigned for the repayment of the sum borrowed, should be sufficient to meet both principal and interest, and that, too, within a specified term. In truth, the loans of which we now speak, were nothing more than anticipations, as it were, of the revenue. But this equitable system ceased at the revolution. The war in Ireland continued longer after the abdication of James than was expected; the expense became intolerable, and neither parliament, nor the public bodies to whom William applied, afforded sufficient for the supply of the troops in Ireland. An expedient was adopted. The long annuities were created; this took place in 1692: the capital sum of 881,4937. was raised upon annuities of ninety-nine years, bearing interest at per cent. until the year 1700, when the interest was to be reduced to 7 per cent., with the benefit of survivorship for the lives of the nominees of those who contributed. This measure proved so successful, that the king followed it up by the institution of the short annuities, by which a million was borrowed, every subscriber receiving 14 per cent. for sixteen years, besides " a beneficial lottery ticket." This sum was not even enough. The Bank of England was established, and its nativity was associated with the fact of lending King William 1,200,000l. at 8 per cent. There were, at the period mentioned, two East India Companies: the new one came forward to offer two millions at 8 per cent., on condition that

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the principal would be paid before the expiration of the charter in 1711; but it was never paid. Fresh contrivances for increasing the supplies were required by William for carrying on his operations against Louis XIV. and the ingenuity of his Chancellor, Montague, brought forth the scheme of exchequer bills. This sort of document made its first appearance in 1696. The system of national gambling now received a strong impulse: new lotteries were planned; exorbitant premiums were given for money; and a considerable addition was made to the debt. The amount of the various loans which were raised in the interval from 5th November, 1688, to the year 1702, was in all forty-four millions, one hundred thousand, seven hundred and ninety-five pounds, of which upwards of thirtyfour millions were paid. Thus it appears, that at the demise of William the Third, the amount of the national debt created by him was 16,394,7027.

The accession of Anne was marked by a declaration of war against France and Spain at the same time, and the expenses which were necessarily induced by the subsequent military operations, called for all the resources, good and bad, of the government. Thus we find, that annuities for ninety-nine years were granted at fifteen years purchase; annuities for lives followed this arrangement; one life was rated at one year's purchase, two lives at eleven years, and three at twelve. But the result was, that British credit sank to zero in the market; for the "tallies," and "deficiencies," as they were called, sold at 40 per cent. under discount. Nothing else could be expected from the shoals of government expedients which were poured forth for obtaining supplies, such as tontines, lotteries, &c. In 1711, the infamous South Sea bubble was established. It is now pretty plain that this Company, nominally raised to carry on commercial connexions with the South Sea, really was got up to extricate the government from the embarrassments arising from its own profligacy. The whole arrangements were superintended by the Treasury, and the result of this and other acts of gross gambling and fraud was, that the national debt was augmented from sixteen to fifty-four millions! George I., actuated by a love of justice, reduced the interest of the debt, and sought, in every way, to establish a system of correction and economy. But the schemes of those in influence counteracted his wise intentions. The ministry of this king consented to a villainous proposal to buy up all the debts of the different companies, and to make the South Sea Association the sole creditor of the state. The scheme exceeded the most sanguine expectations; the stock fetched ten times its value, and the capital amounted to upwards of thirty-three millions. During the reign of this George, however, only two millions and a half were borrowed; but the debt, at his demise, was over fifty-two millions.

George II. did all in his power to preserve peace, and the success which crowned his efforts in the first twelve years, led to the fortu