kept full, the nation would ere now have been reaping the benefit of such a policy. We should have had the satisfaction of seeing our debt annually diminishing, and the interest of it becoming less; whereas, by the wretched system of fiddling popularity which has been pursued, the debt has augmented in time of peace, the annual burdens absolutely increased, ruinous competition been fostered, and internal jealousies excited. The Whigs, who arrogate for themselves, not only now but in former times, the guardianship of the liberties of Britain, have taken especial pains to conceal the fact that they were, in reality, the authors of our funding system, and the bitterest opponents of those who early descried its remote and ruinous consequences. Their motives cannot be concealed, however it may be their interest at the present time to gloss them over. Lord Bolingbroke thus exposes their occult designs, in his "_Letters on the Use of History_." "Few men, at the time (1688), looked forward enough to foresee the necessary consequences of the new constitution of the revenue that was soon afterwards formed, nor of the method of funding that immediately took place; which, absurd as they are, have continued ever since, till it is become scarce possible to alter them. Few people, I say, saw how the creation of funds, and the multiplication of taxes, would increase yearly the power of the Crown, and bring our liberties, by a natural and necessary progression, into more real though less apparent danger than they were in before the Revolution! The excessive ill husbandry practised from the very beginning of King William's reign, and which laid the foundation of all we feel and fear, was not the effect of ignorance, mistake, or what we call chance, _but of design and scheme in those who had the sway at the time_. I am not so uncharitable, however, as to believe that they intended to bring upon their country all the mischiefs that we who came after them experience and apprehend. No: they saw the measures they took singly and unrelatively, or relatively alone to some immediate object. The notion of attaching men to the new government, by tempting them to embark their fortunes on the same bottom, was a reason of state to some; the notion of creating a new, that is, a moneyed interest, in opposition to the landed interest, or as a balance to it, and of acquiring a superior interest in the city of London at least, by the establishment of great corporations, was a reason of party to others: and I make no doubt that the opportunity of amassing immense estates, by the management of funds, by trafficking in paper, and by all the arts of jobbing, was a reason of private interest to those who supported and improved that scheme of iniquity, if not to those who devised it. They looked no further. Nay, we who came after them, and