promoting commerce and riches than to create funds, and debts, and taxes without limitation? Discourses such as these might naturally have passed for trials of wit among rhetoricians, like the panegyrics on folly and a fever, on Busiris and Nero, had we not seen such absurd maxims patronized by great ministers and by a whole party among us; and these puzzling arguments (for they deserve not the name of specious), though they could not be the foundation of Lord {p86} Orford’s conduct, for he had more sense, served at least to keep his partisans in countenance and perplex the understanding of the nation.
Let us examine the consequences of public debts, both in our domestic management by their influence on commerce and industry, and in our foreign transactions by their effect on wars and negotiations.
There is a word which is here in the mouth of everybody, and which I find has also got abroad and is much employed by foreign writers29 in imitation of the English—and this is “circulation.” This word serves as an account of everything, and though I confess that I have sought for its meaning in the present subject