“So you venture to write that down as you speak it,” said Marie. “Will you let the word ‘easy’ stand?” “Yes; because it is used as a comparative term. Almost any plan would be more easy than sustaining this burden from year to year. A temporary inconvenience only would be the result of getting rid of it. I question whether any one person would be ruined; and of the many who must sacrifice a part of their property, every one would reap certain advantages which must in time compensate, or more than compensate, himself or his children. To the bulk of the people the blessing would be incalculable. It is not for those who most proudly boast of the resources of the country to doubt whether the thing can be done.” “A rich and noble country is yours,” observed M. Verblanc; “and the greater is the wonder and the shame that it contains so much misery,— such throngs of the destitute. Enormous as has been and now is the expenditure of your government, how have you not only sustained your resources, but augmented them! How have you, while paying for your wars, improved your lands, and your shipping, and your manufactures, and built docks, and opened canals, and stretched out roads! And while the nation has thus been growing rich, what crowds of your people have been growing poor!” “And how should it be otherwise, when the pressure of public loans falls so unequally as in England? Fearful as is the amount, the inequality of pressure is a far greater evil. It is very possible,—when we consider the excitement afforded to industry and invention by a popular war,—that the capital of the country would not have been very much greater than now if we had been spared the wars and other wasteful expenditure of the public money of the last twenty years; but the distribution is in consequence most faulty, and the future incumbrances of the people fearful to contemplate.” “From your rulers having carried their system of borrowing too far. There is, to be sure, all the difference in the world between an individual borrowing for the sake of trade, or profit in some form or other, and governments borrowing that which is to be dissipated in the air or the sea, or shed upon the ground, so that it can be no more gathered up again than the rain which sinks into the thirsty soil.” “Why cannot war-money be raised from year to year,” asked Marie, “so that the nation might know what it was about in undertaking a war? When my father rebuilt his château, he paid for each part as it proceeded, and so brought away with him no reproach of debt.”