A nation desirous of establishing public credit should begin, he said, by acquiring a revenue equal to its fixed expenditure, and must manifest an inclination to be honest by performing its engagements with respect to public debts. This maxim he had constantly enforced to the Portuguese government, and if they had minded it, instead of trusting to the fallacious hope of getting loans in England, the deficiency of their revenue would have been made up, without imposing new taxes, and even with the repeal of many which were oppressive and unjust. The fair and honest collection of taxes, which ought to exist, would have been sufficient. For after protracted and unsparing exertions, and by refusing to accept their paper money on any other condition in his commissariat transactions, he had at last forced the Portuguese authorities to pay the interest of that paper and of their exchequer bills, called “_Apolocies grandes_,” and the effect had been to increase the resources of the government though the government had even in the execution evinced its corruption. Then showing in detail how this benefit had been produced he traced the mischief created by men whom he called the _sharks_ of Lisbon and other great towns, meaning speculators, principally Englishmen, whose nefarious cupidity led them to cry down the credit of the army-bills, and then purchase them, to the injury of the public and of the poor people who furnished the supplies. A plan of recoining the Spanish dollars and so gaining eight in the hundred of pure silver which they contained above that of the Portuguese cruzado, he treated as a fraud, and a useless one. In Lisbon, where the cruzado was current, some gain might perhaps be made; but it was not even there certain, and foreigners, Englishmen and Americans, from whom the great supplies were purchased, would immediately add to their prices in proportion to the deterioration of the coin. Moreover the operations and expenditure of the army were not confined to Lisbon, nor even to Portugal, and the cruzado would not pass for its nominal value in Spain; thus instead of an advantage, the greatest inconvenience would result from a scheme at the best unworthy of the British government. In fine the reform of abuses, the discontinuance of useless expenses, economy and energy were the only remedies.