These facilities proved amply sufficient for every exigency. The public debt increased with unheard of rapidity under the influence and the expenses of the wars in which England was successively engaged. In 1706, when its foundation was laid, it amounted to but little more than five millions sterling, and in 1777 it had increased to one hundred and thirty-six millions sterling. Near the latter period the subjects of public debt, the principles of the English funding system, and their effects in all countries where they had been adopted, were brought to a searching scrutiny by Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations," who demonstrated from reason and experience that they had invariably enfeebled every nation which had embraced them. He insisted that there was scarcely an instance in which a public debt contracted and established upon those principles had been fully paid, and that the revenues of the countries subject to such incumbrances had been relieved from the destructive effects of an irredeemable public debt, if relieved at all, either by avowed bankruptcy or by pretended payments through such artifices as adulterations of the coin, or raising its denomination, or by reductions of the rate of interest. In 1786, four years before the introduction of Hamilton's funding system, the public debt of England had already increased to £276,000,000; and so rapid has been its subsequent growth that the strictures and predictions of Adam Smith are at this day receiving their confirmation in the existence of a national debt of more than £800,000,000. By no people were these facts and circumstances, so far as they had then transpired, better understood than by ours. They had watched the condition of England, in regard to her increasing debt, through the Revolutionary contest in the hope that she would be compelled by the very extent of her indebtedness to stay the hand she had uplifted to enslave them. It ought not therefore to have been a matter of surprise to Hamilton and his associates, and cannot be to us viewing these matters retrospectively, that his recommendation of a funding system, upon the English plan, with a national bank as its adjunct, as the first great measures of the new government, were received by large portions, probably a majority, of the people, with so much dissatisfaction and distrust of the motives in which the recommendation had its origin--a distrust naturally produced by the precipitate resort to the system of a nation against which the hostile feelings of the war had not yet subsided, and which under that system, in the estimation of many sober minded and sagacious men, was rapidly sinking into the gulf of hopeless indebtedness.