In such vague promise, I have for the most part hitherto spoken, not because my own plans were unfixed, but because I knew they would only be mocked at, until by some years of persistence the scheme had run the course of the public talk, and until I had publicly challenged the denial of its principles in their abstract statement, long enough to show them to be invincible. Of these abstract principles, the fifteenth, sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-second and twenty-third letters in ‘Time and Tide,’ express all that is needful; only, in the years that have passed since they were written, the ‘difficulties’ stated in the seventeenth chapter have been under constant review by me; and of the ways in which I mean to deal with them it is now time to speak. Let us understand then, in the outset, the moral difference between a national debt and a national store. A national debt, like any other, may be honestly incurred in case of need, and honestly paid in due time. But if a man should be ashamed to borrow, much more should a people; and if a father holds it his honour to provide for his children, and would be ashamed to borrow from them, and leave, with his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren to pay, much more should a nation be ashamed to borrow, in any case, or in any manner; and if it borrow at all, it is at least in honour bound to borrow from living men, and not indebt itself to its own unborn brats. If it can’t provide for them, at least let it not send their cradles to the pawnbroker, and pick the pockets of their first breeches. A national debt, then, is a foul disgrace, at the best. But it is, as now constituted, also a foul crime. National debts paying interest are simply the purchase, by the rich, of power to tax the poor. Read carefully the analysis given of them above, Letter VIII., p. 7. The financial operations of the St. George’s Company will be the direct reverse of these hitherto approved arrangements. They will consist in the accumulation of national wealth and store, and therefore in distribution to the poor, instead of taxation of them; and the fathers will provide for, and nobly endow, not steal from, their children and children’s children. My readers, however, will even yet, I am well aware, however often I have reiterated the statement to them, be unable to grasp the idea of a national store, as an existing possession. They can conceive nothing but a debt;—nay, there are many of them who have a confused notion that a debt is a store! The store of the St. George’s Company, then, is to be primarily of food; next, of materials for clothing and covert; next, of books and works of art,—food, clothes, books, and works of art being all good, and every poisonous condition of any of them destroyed. The food will not be purveyed by the Borgia, nor the clothing dyed by Deianira, nor the Scriptures written under dictation of the Devil instead of God.