The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series by Sir Richard Steele;Joseph Addison
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page 100 of 3879 (02%)
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While they dance Bayes cries, mightily taken with his device, 'Now the Earth's before the Moon; now the Moon's before the Sun: there's the Eclipse again.'] [Footnote 8: The elector of Hanover, who, in 1714, became King George I.] [Footnote 9: In the year after the foundation of the Bank of England, Mr. Charles Montague,--made in 1700 Baron and by George I., Earl of Halifax, then (in 1695) Chancellor of the Exchequer,--restored the silver currency to a just standard. The process of recoinage caused for a time scarcity of coin and stoppage of trade. The paper of the Bank of England fell to 20 per cent. discount. Montague then collected and paid public debts from taxes imposed for the purpose and invented (in 1696), to relieve the want of currency, the issue of Exchequer bills. Public credit revived, the Bank capital increased, the currency sufficed, and. says Earl Russell in his Essay on the English Government and Constitution, 'from this time loans were made of a vast increasing amount with great facility, and generally at a low interest, by which the nation were enabled to resist their enemies. The French wondered at the prodigious efforts that were made by so small a power, and the abundance with which money was poured into its treasury... Books were written, projects drawn up, edicts prepared, which were to give to France the same facilities as her rival; every plan that fiscal ingenuity could strike out, every calculation that laborious arithmetic could form, |
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