Bills of exchange and paper money, which have become known and general only in modern Europe, might have gone far to mitigate these disastrous consequences in particular states, or even, if conducted with prudence and regulated by wisdom, might in some places have altogether prevented them. But as paper currency is a new element of surpassing power and efficacy, but recently introduced into common use among men, the principles on which it should be regulated are far from being generally understood. Even if understood, it requires for its due regulation a combination of wisdom and self-denial that can rarely be looked for among the rulers of mankind. The fundamental principles on which its due regulation must be rested--that of being based on _certain and available property of some kind_, and of being capable of _extension_ in proportion to the increase in the numbers and transactions of men, and the abstraction of the precious metals forming the medium of international circulation, and yet duly restrained and over-issue prevented--were successively overlooked by the greatest and most enlightened nations of the world. Issued in unbounded profusion in France during the fervour of the Revolution and the terrors of European invasion, with no real basis of available property on which to rest, the assignats produced, simultaneously with the prodigious armaments which saved the country, an unheard-of confusion among the transactions and obligations of men, and destroyed in a few years the whole capital of that great country, the accumulated savings of centuries of industry. Contracted with equal rapidity from the influence of the opposite set of interests in Great Britain after the peace, the paper circulation of the British Empire was rendered the instrument of destruction of property as great, and misery as widespread and universal, among its inhabitants, as the assignats or confiscations of the Convention. Adopted with heedless eagerness, and without any adequate safeguards, at one time in America, and checked at another with precipitate and imprudent severity, four-fifths of the wealth of the United States were in a few years swept away by the fearful oscillation of prices consequent on these violent changes. And although wisdom and prudence could easily have devised a system of paper currency which, entirely based upon available property of some kind, and therefore perfectly secure, was yet capable of expansion in proportion to the increase of the numbers and transactions of men, and the temporary abstraction of the precious metals from a particular country by the mutations of commerce or the necessities of war, yet it was evident that no such wise and patriotic system was to be anticipated, till a vast amount of general suffering had enlightened the majority of men on the subject. Least of all could it be hoped for in Great Britain, where the increase and weight of the moneyed interests, and the consequent determination to enhance the value