But to discard all considerations of a personal and subordinate nature, it is essential to the well-being of the republic that the practical or organic part of the constitution should correspond with its principles; and as this does not appear to be the case in the plan that has been presented to you, it is absolutely necessary that it should be submitted to the revision of a committee, who should be instructed to compare it with the Declaration of Rights, in order to ascertain the difference between the two, and to make such alterations as shall render them perfectly consistent and compatible with each other. XXVI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENGLISH SYSTEM OF FINANCE.(1) "On the verge, nay even in the gulph of bankruptcy." 1 This pamphlet, as Paine predicts at its close (no doubt on good grounds), was translated into all languages of Europe, and probably hastened the gold suspension of the Bank of England (1797), which it predicted. The British Government entrusted its reply to Ralph Broome and George Chalmers, who wrote pamphlets. There is in the French Archives an order for 1000 copies, April 27, 1796, nineteen days after Paine's pamphlet appeared. "Mr. Cobbett has made this little pamphlet a text-book for most of his elaborate treatises on our finances.... On the authority of a late Register of Mr. Cobbett's I learn that the profits arising from the sale of this pamphlet were devoted [by Paine] to the relief of the prisoners confined in Newgate for debt."--"Life of Paine," by Richard Carlile, 1819.--_Editor._. Debates in Parliament. Nothing, they say, is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying; yet we can always fix a period beyond which man cannot live, and within some moment of which he will die. We are enabled to do this, not by any spirit of prophecy, or foresight into the event, but by observation of what has happened in all cases of human or animal existence. If then any other subject, such, for instance, as a system of finance, exhibits in its progress a series of symptoms indicating decay, its final dissolution is certain, and the period of it can be calculated from the symptoms it exhibits.