Was the capital of the country exhausted by these enormous contributions of A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY MILLIONS annually to the public service, in the twentieth year of the most costly war on record? So far from it, the great loan for 1814 of £39,000,000 was made at the _rate of_ £4, 11s. 1d. PER CENT; that of 1813 at £5, 10s. on an average; that of 1815 at £5, 11s. _per cent._[13] And it is evidently immaterial whether the immense amount of £100,000,000 debt, funded and unfunded together, was contracted in the form of direct loan to government, or of Exchequer bills issued from the Treasury, and forming the unfunded debt. Such bills required to be discounted before they were of any value; and their proceeds, as Mr Porter very properly states, were so much money paid into the public treasury. They were an exchange of the capital of the nation for Treasury bills, and were, therefore, just as much a draft on that capital as the exchange of the sums subscribed in loans for the inscription of certain sums in the 3 _per cent._ consols. In the next place, this poor nation, which has now nearly eaten up its resources in a single season, in the year 1844 possessed, in the two islands, real or heritable property of the yearly value of £105,000,000 sterling,[14] corresponding to a capital, at thirty years' purchase, of £3,150,000,000; and at twenty-five years' purchase, to one of £2,625,000,000. These figures are ascertained in the most authentic manner; that of England by the Report of the Lords' Committee on the burdens of real property;[15] that of Ireland by the Poors' Rate returns; and that of Scotland from an estimate founded on the amount of income-tax paid, as no poors' rate as yet extends universally over the country. Further, we have the authority of Lord Palmerston, in the debate in last session of Parliament on foreign loans, for the assertion that this poor nation has advanced £150,000,000 in loans to republics since 1824, or to monarchies surrounded with republican institutions; the greater part of which has been lost. Yet so far have these copious drafts been from exhausting, or even seriously trenching, on the capital of the nation, that it appears from the subjoined valuable table, furnished from returns allowed to be taken from the great bill-broking house of Overend and Gurney in London,[16] that during that whole period the interest of money, even in the years when the pressure was severest, never rose above _6 per cent._, and immediately after fell to 3½ or 3 _per cent._, and in 1844 and 1845, it is well known, it was still lower, at some times as low as 2½ _per cent._