The greatest and most momentous contests which have taken place among nations, have been in a great degree determined by the discovery or use, by one of the belligerents, of an expansive currency, to which the other was for a time a stranger. The most memorable strife in antiquity, that between Rome and Carthage, on which depended whether Europe or Africa was to become the mistress of the civilised world, was in reality determined by a great extension of the Italian circulating medium during the second Punic war; and that dreadful contest was less brought to a successful issue by the firmness of the senate or the arms of Scipio, than by the wisdom of a decree which virtually, at the crisis of its fate, doubled the currency of the Roman republic.[3] The Transatlantic revolution was brought to a successful issue in the same way; and the independence of the United States is less to be ascribed to the imbecility of British counsels, or the wisdom of American generalship, than to the establishment of a paper currency, which sustained the efforts of the insurgent states when they had no other resources wherewith to maintain the contest. It was the assignats, as all the world knows, that set on foot those prodigious armies which, amidst the destruction of all private fortunes, enabled France, during the Reign of Terror, to repel the assault of all the European powers; and the coalition which at last overturned the empire of Napoleon was sustained by a vast system of paper currency, issued in 1813 in Germany, which, guaranteed by the four Allied powers, passed as gold from the Atlantic Ocean to the wall of China, and arrayed all the armies of Europe in dense and disciplined battalions on the banks of the Rhine. Of what incalculable importance it was may be judged of by the dreadful straits to which Wellington, for five previous years, had been reduced by its want. Great Britain emerged victorious from the strife, chiefly from the powerful influence of the same omnipotent agent. Vain would have been the constancy of Pitt, the genius of Nelson, or the wisdom of Wellington, if the paper currency, established in 1797, had not given her people the sinews of war, and the means of illimitable industry, when the Continent was shut to her commerce, and the whole precious metals were drained away by the necessities of Continental warfare. Nor have the effects of the opposite system, pursued since the peace, been less striking and momentous; for the contraction of British currency to one half of its former dimensions, by the bills of 1819 and 1844, has brought about the dreadful panics of 1825, 1837, and 1847, induced by the decline of prices and the sufferings it occasioned. The English revolution of 1832 transferred power in the British islands exclusively to the inhabitants of towns, and spread such misery through the rural population, that _three hundred thousand_ emigrants now annually leave the British islands for Transatlantic or Australian shores.