Now, the real question which it behoves the moneyed interest, and especially the fundholders, to conder, and that most seriously, is this:--How do they expect that the interest on their bonds or the dividends on their stock are to be paid if this ceaseless and progressive _decline in the resources of their debtors_ is to go on? How are the dividends raised for payment of the national creditors, or the interest provided to meet private mortgages, on which so large a part, probably two-thirds, of the realised capital of the country depends? Is it not entirely from the exertions of the producing classes, who, or whose fathers, became debtors in these varied transactions? But is it possible that the security of creditors can escape being shaken, if the resources of their debtors are continually declining? In private life we are never mistaken on this subject. If a creditor sees his debtor's funds wasting away under improvident or absurd management, or a landlord sees his tenants running out his land by scourging and ruinous crops, he at once takes the alarm. But with the public creditors the case is just the reverse. They sit by and see the indirect taxes, upon the faith of which their money was advanced, repealed one after another for a long course of years; and the national armaments, upon which the public safety and the independence of the country depend, threatened with ruin by an ignorant, blind, and selfish democracy; and it never enters into their imaginations for a moment to entertain the least apprehension for their own payments. They think, though every other interest in the country is ruined, they will stand erect amidst the wreck. Deceived by the perfect regularity with which their interest has been paid for the last hundred and fifty years, they cannot conceive that it should ever be otherwise. They would as soon expect to see the sun not rise in the morning, as the dividends on the three-per-cents not paid in January and June. But a little consideration must show that this confidence may ere long be found to be misplaced. The dividends are paid entirely out of the national income: whatever seriously affects or diminishes the national income, so much diminishes the fund from which they must be drawn. The ninety millions which Mr Villiers boasts has been cut off from the remuneration of agriculture has made a fearful chasm in it--probably not less than a third of its whole amount. One other such blow, and the payment of the dividends will become impossible--and the moneyed interest, whose selfish rapacity has occasioned all the mischief, will share in the general ruin they have created.