The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Volume III.: 1791-1804Paine, Thomas
History
The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Volume III.: 1791-1804
Paine, Thomas
Political science
When the funding system began, a substitute for gold and silver began
also. That substitute was paper; and the quantity increased as the
quantity of interest increased upon accumulated loans. This appearance
of a new and additional species of money in the nation soon began to
break the relative value which money and the things it will purchase
bore to each other before. Every thing rose in price; but the rise at
first was little and slow, like the difference in units between two
first numbers, 8 and 12, compared with the two last numbers 90 and 135,
in the table. It was however sufficient to make itself considerably felt
in a large transaction. When therefore government, by engaging in a new
war, required a new loan, it was obliged to make a higher loan than the
former loan, to balance the increased price to which things had risen;
and as that new loan increased the quantity of paper in proportion
to the new quantity of interest, it carried the price of things still
higher than before. The next loan was again higher, to balance that
further increased price; and all this in the same manner, though not
in the same degree, that every new emission of continental money in
America, or of assignats in France, was greater than the preceding
emission, to make head against the advance of prices, till the combat
could be maintained no longer. Herein is founded the necessity of which
I have just spoken. That necessity proceeds with accelerating velocity,
and the ratio I have laid down is the measure of that acceleration; or,
to speak the technical language of the subject, it is the measure of the
increasing depreciation of funded paper money, which it is impossible to
prevent while the quantity of that money and of bank notes continues to
multiply. What else but this can account for the difference between one
war costing 21 millions, and another war costing 160 millions?
The difference cannot be accounted for on the score of extraordinary
efforts or extraordinary achievements. The war that cost twenty-one
millions was the war of the con-federates, historically called the grand
alliance, consisting of England, Austria, and Holland in the time of
William III. against Louis XIV. and in which the confederates were
victorious. The present is a war of a much greater confederacy--a
confederacy of England, Austria, Prussia, the German Empire, Spain,
Holland, Naples, and Sardinia, eight powers, against the French Republic
singly, and the Republic has beaten the whole confederacy.--But to
return to my subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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