by the project of a sinking fund. When national debts grew heavy, various projects were devised in different countries for conjuring them away without the unpleasant process of paying. The Mississippi scheme and the South Sea scheme were among the number. Tampering with the currency was a coarse expedient. The simplest was that of the French Finance Minister, Abbé Terrai, who repudiated fifty per cent, and proved that the glory of repudiation is not monopolised by republics. The sinking fund was a project for conjuring away the debt by the magic of compound interest. People think that money at compound interest grows of itself like a plant. But compound interest, in the case of individuals, is merely compound savings reinvested, and compound diversions of capital from other investments. In the case of a national sinking fund it is compound payments made by the nation to itself. Of course, as soon as the question arises between further borrowing, perhaps at a high rate of interest, for some pressing emergency, and dipping into the sinking fund, the sinking fund goes to the wall. There are only three courses for nations which have run into debt to bear the debt for ever, to become bankrupt, or to remain at peace, retrench and pay.

It does seem, however, that a nation ought to take advantage of its immortality, and to borrow on terminable rather than on perpetual annuities. To the mortal creditor there is no difference between an annuity for the longest span of mortal interest and an annuity for ever. To the immortal nation there is, between a burden for a century and a burden for ever, all the difference in the world. Destiny mocks the hopes of man. This is the minister of whom it was too truly said 'Mr. Pitt's

memory needs no statues.

Six hundred millions of irredeemable debt are the eternal record of his fame." He ought, from his early studies and experiences, to have felt more strongly the injustice of laying burdens on other generations without their own consent. In barbarous ages, people when they went to war fought themselves. Civilisation taught them to hire, impress, or kidnap other people to fight for them. Still there was a check on war while those who made it had to pay. Taxation of the present was confined within narrow limits; it provoked unpleasant outcries, sometimes it provoked resistance. So the expedient was hit upon

of taxing the mute and unresisting future. The system was perfected by degrees. At first the government only anticipated payments which they might, with some colour of reason, call their own. Then they mortgaged particular sources of revenue. Funding with us dates from William III.; hence to the author of the great Whig epic, of which William is the Achilles, the system seems all lilacs and roses.

Pitt's financial speeches were as notable as his budgets. Inferior, no doubt, in knowledge to those of Peel, they are superior in form, which is something when people are to be instructed on a subject to most men at once repulsive and obscure.

In the mind of Pitt, as in that of Adam Smith, as in that of Cobden, as in the counsels of Providence, free trade was connected with a policy of peace and goodwill among nations. Pitt, too, was an international man. Since the religious wars of the sixteenth century, hatred had been the law of Christendom. International malignity had been organised under the name of the Balance of Power. Each nation had thought itself

prosperous just so far as it could prevent the prosperity of others. Hence protection, the colonial system, and commercial as well as diplomatic wars. Chatham's glory had been bound up with these notions, especially with the notion of eternal enmity between England and France. But Chatham's son, enlightened by a better teacher, commenced the work of healing, through free commercial intercourse, the divisions of Christendom. The precursor of Cobden, he carried, against strong opposition, a commercial treaty with France. Fox was a man of larger sympathies than Pitt, and if he had been in power would probably have been on the whole a better foreign minister; but party, sacred party, hurried him and his liberal friends into denouncing the treaty on the most illiberal grounds of international jealousy. In defending it, Pitt combated, in language which Cobden might have used, the doctrine that France must be the unalterable enemy of Britain. He treated as monstrous, and as founded neither in nature nor in history, the position that one nation could be the unalterable enemy of another. He called it a libel on society, as supposing the existence of diabolical malice in the original frame of man. He was obliged to pay some homage to the war spirit, as in truth does Adam Smith; and he urges that whatever enriches us will, when the time comes, give us the sinews of war. he returns to less equivocal ground in showing that the chances of war will be diminished when nations are bound together by free trade. The chances of war will be diminished. Let us not, in the face of so many victories of principle, honour, passion over mere interest, imagine that any bond of mere interest can do more. If to slake a fierce hatred or to uphold a

But

great cause men will sacrifice their lives, much more will they for a time sacrifice the luxuries for which they are dependent on foreign trade. The only sure guarantee of peace is morality. The next greatest is not commerce but freedom, which puts down standing armies. A commercial treaty is a poor set-off against the mischief done by a military despotism, the great embodiment and consecration of the war spirit in the world: and if we were to truck our abhorrence of military despotism for such a treaty, we should find-to put the question on the lowest ground-that we had bought our mess of pottage far too dear.

Adam Smith had advocated the union of Ireland with England. He had pointed out that free trade with England would far more than make up to Ireland for the increase of taxation-that by the union of his own country with England, the Scotch people had been delivered from the Scotch aristocracy-that by the same process Ireland 'might be delivered from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy the most odious. of all, an aristocracy of political and religious prejudice, which, more than any other distinctions, animated the insolence of the oppressor and the hatred of the oppressed, and made the natives of the same country greater enemies than those of different countries ever were.' At this time the relations between Ireland and England were such as could not be endured. The Protestant Republicans of the North of Ireland—they, mind, not the Catholics-taking advantage of the weakness of England after her reverses in the American war, and catching the infection of the American Revolution, had risen in arms, under pretence of forming a volunteer army for the defence of the kingdom, and English Essays III.

6

extorted legislative independence. The result was not, be it remarked, a Federal union, with a Federal government having a definite province of its own, but two independent Parliaments under one Crown; and the Crown being constitutional, the two Parliaments were two sovereign powers. There was an hourly danger of a divergence of policy, even on questions of peace and war. At the same time, the Catholics remained excluded from the Irish Parliament, and Protestant ascendancy was thus left rampant, without any imperial control. The consequence was that Ireland was ruled, and her policy kept in union with that of England, by systematic corruption. Mr. Massey, the recent historian of this period, has found, among the original papers with which his work is enriched, a sort of chart of the Irish Parliament, drawn up confidentially for the guidance of Pitt:

'H. H., son-in-law to Lord A., and brought into Parliament by him. Studies the law; wishes to be a Commissioner of Barracks, or in some similar place. Would go into orders, and take a living.

'H. D., brother to Lord C. Applied for office, but as no specific promise could be made, has lately voted in opposition. Easy to be had, if thought expedient. A silent, gloomy man.

'L. M., refuses to accept £500 a year: states very high pretensions for his skill in House of Commons management. Expects £1,000 a year.-NB.: Be careful of him.

'J. N. has been in the army, and is now on half pay wishes a troop of dragoons, or full pay. States his pretensions to be fifteen years' service in Parliament. -NB.: Would prefer office to military promotion;