“It has been attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question: ‘If taxes be the cause of the people’s misery, how comes it that they were not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?’ Here is a fallacy, which you will be careful to detect. I know that the taxes have been reduced, that is to say, _nominally_ reduced, but not so in fact; on the contrary, they have in reality been greatly augmented. This has been done by _the sleight of hand_ of paper-money. Suppose, for instance, that four years ago I had 100 pounds to pay in taxes, then 130 bushels of wheat would have paid my share. If I have _now_ seventy-five pounds to pay in taxes, it will require 190 bushels of wheat to pay my share of taxes. Consequently, though my taxes are nominally reduced, they are, in reality, greatly augmented. This has been done by the legerdemain of paper-money. In 1812, the pound note was worth only thirteen shillings in silver. It is now worth twenty shillings. Therefore, when we now pay a pound note to the tax-gatherer, we really pay him twenty shillings, where we before paid him thirteen shillings; and the fund-holders who lent pound notes worth thirteen shillings each, are now paid their interest in pounds worth twenty shillings each. And the thing is come to what Sir Francis Burdett told the parliament it would come to. He told them, in 1811, that if they ever attempted to pay the interest of their debt in gold and silver, or in paper-money equal in value to gold and silver, the farmers and tradesmen must be ruined, and the journeymen and labourers reduced to the last stage of misery. “Thus, then, it is clear that it is the weight of the taxes, under which you are sinking, which has already pressed so many of you down into the state of paupers, and which now threatens to deprive many of you of your existence. We next come to consider what have been _the causes_ of this weight of taxes. Here we must go back a little in our history; and you will soon see that this intolerable weight has all proceeded from _the want of a parliamentary Reform_.