But the great and permanent difficulty was to raise money. The country, inundated with bank-notes, was destitute of gold; Napoleon’s continental system burthened commerce, the exchanges were continually rising against England, and all the evils which sooner or later are the inevitable result of a fictitious currency, were too perceptible to be longer disregarded in parliament. A committee appointed to investigate the matter, made early in the following session, a report in which the evils of the existing system, and the causes of the depreciation were elaborately treated, and the necessity of returning to cash payments enforced: but the authors did not perceive, or at least did not touch upon the injustice, and the ruin, attending a full payment in coin of sterling value, of debts contracted in a depreciated paper currency. The celebrated writer, William Cobbett, did not fail, however, to point out this very clearly, and subsequent experience has confirmed his views. The government endeavoured to stave off the discussion of the bullion question, but lord King, by demanding gold from those of his tenants whose leases were drawn before the depreciation of bank-notes, proved the hollowness of the system, and drove the ministers to the alternative, of abandoning the prosecution of the war, or of denying the facts adduced in the bullion report. They adopted the latter; and at the instance of Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, the house voted in substance, that a pound-note and a shilling, were equal in value to a golden guinea of full weight, at the moment when light guineas were openly selling at twenty-eight shillings. This vote, although well calculated to convince the minister’s opponents, that no proposition could be too base, or absurd, to meet with support in the existing parliament, did not, however, remove the difficulties of raising money, and no resource remained, but that of the desperate spendthrift, who never intending to pay, cares not on what terms he supplies his present necessities. The peculiar circumstances of the war, had, however, given England a monopoly of the world’s commerce by sea, and the ministers affirming, that, the country, was in a state of unexampled prosperity, began a career of expense, the like of which no age or nation had ever seen; yet without one sound or reasonable ground for expecting ultimate success, save the genius of their general, which they but half appreciated, and which the first bullet might have extinguished for ever.