unjust; its practice in England has been equally injurious.
In Holland, with a small population engaged in the same
pursuits, in fact a nation of bankers, the system was adapted
to the circumstances which had created it. All shared in the
present spoil, and therefore could endure the future burthen.
And so to this day Holland is sustained, almost solely
sustained, by the vast capital thus created which still
lingers amongst its dykes. But applied to a country in which
the circumstances were entirely different; to a considerable
and rapidly-increasing population; where there was a numerous
peasantry, a trading middle class struggling into existence;
the system of Dutch finance, pursued more or less for nearly a
century and a half, has ended in the degradation of a fettered
and burthened multitude. Nor have the demoralizing
consequences of the funding system on the more favoured
classes been less decided. It has made debt a national habit;
it has made credit the ruling power, not the exceptional
auxiliary, of all transactions; it has introduced a loose,
inexact, haphazard, and dishonest spirit in the conduct of
both public and private life; a spirit dazzling and yet
dastardly: reckless of consequences and yet shrinking from
responsibility. And in the end, it has so overstimulated the
energies of the population to maintain the material
engagements of the state, and of society at large, that the
moral condition of the people has been entirely lost sight of.

A mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home
trade founded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people;
these are great evils, but ought perhaps cheerfully to he
encountered for the greater blessings of civil and religious