The first is, that the interest of money has, by the recommendation, and indeed express injunction of government, been raised to _eight percent_. This grievous and most calamitous effect, which was never heard of during the darkest period of the Revolutionary war, which did not ensue even at the time of the Mutiny of the Nore, or the suspension of cash payments in 1797,[7] has been publicly announced to the nation, in the Premier's and Chancellor of the Exchequer's Letter to the Directors. It is well known that, high as this rate of interest was, it was _less_ than had been previously taken by private bankers, which had risen to nine, ten, and even fourteen or fifteen _per cent_. for short periods. These are the rates of interest which, anterior to their conquest by the British government, were common amidst Asiatic oppression in the distracted realm of Hindostan. They had not been so high in England before for a century and a quarter. It was reserved for Great Britain, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to render universal, by the effects of domestic legislation, at the end of thirty years' peace, and when in a state of entire amity with all the world, a rate of interest unknown for a century before in the British empire; which could previously be hardly credited as having existed, even in the days of feudal barbarity; and which had latterly been known only amidst the predatory warfare, fierce devastations, and universal hoarding of specie, under the native powers of Hindostan.