I feel my own insufficiency to unfold the many combinations which such an operation must imply. I therefore shall not attempt what, at any rate, I must leave imperfect. What has been said, combined with what has been thrown out on the same subject, in treating of other matters, is sufficient to give a hint, as to the expediency of the plan in general. And as to the objection which arises from the payments to the public creditors abroad, I shall reserve the more ample discussion of it till I come to consider the doctrine of public credit. END OF THE THIRD PART. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL OECONOMY. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BOOK IV. | OF CREDIT AND DEBTS. PART IV. OF PUBLIC CREDIT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAP. I. _Of the various Consequences of Public Debts._ The principles which influence the doctrine of public credit are so few, and so plain, that it is surprising to see how circumstances could possibly involve them in the obscurity into which we find them plunged on many occasions. For the better clearing the way towards the main object, I shall shew, from experience, and from the progress of public credit in some nations, that the true principles have been overlooked, and confounded so with extraneous objects, as to be entirely lost. The true method of decyphering, as it were, the complicated operations of statesmen with respect to this branch, is to bring back to their native simplicity such plans of administration, as, from the infinite perplexity of them, make people believe, that the principles which influence this district of science lie so involved, as to require a peculiar force of genius even to comprehend them. By proceeding in this plain track, and by keeping the principles constantly in view, the most perplexed systems of borrowing, funding, stock-jobbing, coining and re-coining of money, changing the weight, fineness, and denominations of specie, circulating paper in conjunction with it, imposing upon mankind with bubbles and bankruptcies, and calling them operations of public credit, may be rendred intelligible to the most slender capacity. Many of these topics have been already explained, and dismissed. This will enable us to contract the plan of what remains in proportion to the objects it is to comprehend.