be too confident that she could support, without
great distress, a burden a little greater
than what has already been laid upon her.
When national debts have once been accumulated
to a certain degree, there is scarce, I
believe, a single instance of their having been
fairly and completely paid. The liberation
of the public revenue, if it has ever been
brought about at all, has always been brought
about by a bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed
one, though frequently by a pretended
payment.
The raising of the denomination of the coin
has been the most usual expedient by which a
real public bankruptcy has been disguised
under the appearance of a pretended payment.
If a sixpence, for example, should, either
by act of parliament or royal proclamation,
be raised to the denomination of a shilling,
and twenty sixpences to that of a pound sterling;
the person who, under the old denomination,
had borrowed twenty shillings, or near
four ounces of silver, would, under the new,
pay with twenty sixpences, or with something
less than two ounces. A national debt of
about a hundred and twenty-eight millions,
near the capital of the funded and unfunded
debt of Great Britain, might, in this manner,
be paid with about sixty-four millions
of our present money. It would, indeed, be
a pretended payment only, and the creditors
of the public would really be defrauded of ten
shillings in the pound of what was due to
them. The calamity, too, would extend much
further than to the creditors of the public,
and those of every private person would suffer
a proportionable loss; and this without
any advantage, but in most cases with a great
additional loss, to the creditors of the public.
If the creditors of the public, indeed, were
generally much in debt to other people, they
might in some measure compensate their loss
by paying their creditors in the same coin in
which the public had paid them. But in most
countries, the creditors of the public are, the
greater part of them, wealthy people, who stand
more in the relation of creditors than in that
of debtors, towards the rest of their fellow-citizens.
A pretended payment of this kind,
therefore, instead of alleviating, aggravates, in
most cases, the loss of the creditors of the
public; and, without any advantage to the
public, extends the calamity to a great number
of other innocent people. It occasions a
general and most pernicious subversion of the
fortunes of private people; enriching, in
most cases, the idle and profuse debtor, at
the expense of the industrious and frugal
creditor; and transporting a great part of the
national capital from the hands which were
likely to increase and improve it, to those who
are likely to dissipate and destroy it. When
it becomes necessary for a state to declare itself
bankrupt, in the same manner as when it
becomes necessary for an individual to do so,
a fair, open, and avowed bankruptcy, is always
the measure which is both least dishonourable
to the debtor, and least hurtful to the
creditor. The honour of a state is surely
very poorly provided for, when, in order to
cover the disgrace of a real bankruptcy, it
has recourse to a juggling trick of this kind,
so easily seen through, and at the same time
so extremely pernicious.
Almost all states, however, ancient as well
as modern, when reduced to this necessity,
have, upon some occasions, played this very
juggling trick. The Romans, at the end of
the first Punic war, reduced the As, the coin
or denomination by which they computed the
value of all their other coins, from containing
twelve ounces of copper, to contain only two
ounces; that is, they raised two ounces of
copper to a denomination which had always
before expressed the value of twelve ounces.
The republic was, in this manner, enabled to
pay the great debts which it had contracted
with the sixth part of what it really owed.
So sudden and so great a bankruptcy, we
should in the present times be apt to imagine,
must have occasioned a very violent popular
clamour. It does not appear to have occasioned
any. The law which enacted it was,
like all other laws relating to the coin, introduced
and carried through the assembly of the
people by a tribune, and was probably a very
popular law. In Rome, as in all other ancient
republics, the poor people were constantly
in debt to the rich and the great, who, in
order to secure their votes at the annual elections,
used to lend them money at exorbitant
interest, which, being never paid, soon accumulated
into a sum too great for the debtor
to pay, or for any body else to pay for him.
The debtor, for fear of a very severe execution,
was obliged, without any further gratuity, to
vote for the candidate whom the creditor recommended.
In spite of all the laws against
bribery and corruption, the bounty of the candidates,
together with the occasional distributions
of coin which were ordered by the senate,
were the principal funds from which, during
the latter times of the Roman republic, the
poorer citizens derived their subsistence. To
deliver themselves from this subjection to
their creditors, the poorer citizens were continually
calling out, either for an entire abolition
of debts, or for what they called new
tables; that is, for a law which should entitle
them to a complete acquittance, upon paying
only a certain proportion of their accumulated
debts. The law which reduced the coin
of all denominations to a sixth part of its former
value, as it enabled them to pay their
debts with a sixth part of what they really
owed, was equivalent to the most advantageous
new tables. In order to satisfy the people,
the rich and the great were, upon several
different occasions, obliged to consent to laws,
both for abolishing debts, and for introducing
new tables; and they probably were induced
to consent to this law, partly for the same