‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier. ‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did not lose their seed. ‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour. ‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a mortar, and changed their substance. ‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool. ‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles. ‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much they got by it. ‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap. ‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling. ‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in them. ‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to nothing. ‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market; which seemed to me a very good piece of work. ‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’ The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and drakes with the King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then lighting our pipes with them, but a real _bonâ fide_ waste of the means, wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the country, in the carrying on of the war. About one hundred of these five or six hundred millions have been sent directly out of the country in loans to our Allies, from the year 1793 to the year 1815, inclusive, during which period there is not a single year in which we did not (from our desire of peace with the legitimate government of that country) subsidise one or all of the powers of Europe, to carry on war against the rebels, regicides, republicans, and usurpers of France. Now the interest of this money alone would be five millions yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay the amount of the poor-rates of the whole country, which is seven millions of our yearly taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate the mild severity of Mr. Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless part of the subject. Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of the country: there are four or five hundred millions more which have been sunk in the expenses of the war, and which might as well have been sunk in the sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who have been most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of persons who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them in their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper, or the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many hundred