unproductive labour, on war and taxes, or be composed merely of parish and state paupers. All unproductive labour is supported by productive labour. All persons maintained by the taxes or employed by those who are maintained by them are a clog, a dead weight upon those who pay them, that consume the produce of the State, and add nothing to it—a dead carcase fastened to a living one, with this difference, that it still devours the food which it does not provide. Need we ask any farther, how war and taxes, sinecures and monopolies, by degrees, weaken, impoverish, and ruin a State? Or whether they can go on increasing for ever? There is an excess of inequality and oppression, of luxury and want, which no state can survive; as there is a point at which the palsied frame can no longer support itself, and at which the withered tree falls to the ground. If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-account of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted—of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness, and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kickshaws of legitimacy. Half the resources and productive labour of the country for the last twenty years, have been sunk in this debt, and we are now called upon to make good the deficiency—how we can!—It has been shrewdly asked, whether, if every one paid a hundred _per cent._ income tax, the nation could flourish? And when we are told that ‘the war has been a _customer_ to the country for a length of time to the amount of fifty millions a year,’ that is, has drained that sum from the pockets of the nation to employ the hands of the nation in _producing nothing_—we are at no loss to account for the consequences. A writer, whose own fault it is that we do not feel all the respect for him we could wish, has ridiculed the idea of a nation being in debt to itself, ‘like a tradesman to his creditors,’ and contends that ‘a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where what the one loses, the other gains.’ Now men and their wives do not usually pay one another the money