A Residence in France: With an Excursion Up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to SwitzerlandCooper, James Fenimore
History
A Residence in France: With an Excursion Up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to Switzerland
Cooper, James Fenimore
France -- Description and travel; Germany -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
To return to France and the controversy on finance, our opponents had at
length the indiscretion to publish a document that they said had been
furnished them by some of their "_honorables Américains_" and by which
they attempted to prove some one of their various positions; for by this
time they had taken a great many, scarcely any two of which agreed. I
have no doubt that this document, in the present instance, did come from
"Americans," though it originally came from Captain Basil Hall. This
gentleman had appended to his travels, a table, which purported to
contain an arranged statement of the cost of the state governments. You
will form some idea of the value of this table, as a political and
statistical document, by an exposure of one or two of its more prominent
errors. Taking, for instance, our own state; the receipts from the
_property_ of the state, such as its canal, common school, literature,
and other funds, necessarily passing through the treasury, the sum total
is made to figure against us, as the annual charge of government; which,
by these means, is swelled to five times the real amount. Every one
knows that the receipts of the canals alone, the moment that the
conditions of the loans effected to construct them shall admit of their
application, will be more than sufficient to meet the entire charges of
the state government twice over; but, by this mystified statement, we
are made to appear the poorer for every dollar of properly we possess!
And yet this is the nature of the evidence that some of our people
furnished to the writers on the French side of this question; a side
that, by their own showing, was the side of monarchy?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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