believe the sums that can be applied to it are very small in
comparison with the reserves which formed the old sinking-fund.

But another and a very different argument has been adduced, not
certainly for the re-establishment and support of a sinking-fund,
since its fallacy has been exposed, but against the policy of having
exposed it. It is said that the belief in the potency of a
sinking-fund for clearing off the debt inspired public confidence in
the stability of the funds, and that it was wrong to shake this
confidence even by the promulgation of truth. It has often been
supposed, indeed, that the statesmen who mainly carried out the system
were in secret conscious of its fallacy, but were content to carry it
out so long as they saw that it inspired confidence in the public. It
is in allusion to this that we have spoken of the sinking-fund as a
great hoax. We cannot sanction the morality of governments acting on
conscious fallacies; and in this instance the natural confidence in
the funds rather enlarged than decreased when the fallacy was exposed
and the system abandoned.

Keeping in view Dr Price's views of the potentiality of compound
interest, we now give a brief account of a singular attempt made in
France to put them in practice, and by their omnipotence pay our
national debt and that of other nations too, out of a small private
fortune. In the year 1794, a will was registered in France by one
Fortuné Ricard, disposing of a sum of 500 livres, a little more than
L.20 sterling. Fortuné stated that this sum was the result of a
present of twenty-four livres which he had received when he was a boy,
and had kept accumulating at compound interest to a period of advanced
age. By his will he left it in the hands of trustees, making
arrangements for a perpetual succession, as the purposes of the trust