from thirty to sixty pounds a year:  here, he amongst you is a lucky man, who can provide his family with food and with decent clothes to cover them, without any hope of possessing a penny in the days of sickness or of old age. There, the Chief Magistrate receives six thousand pounds a year; here, the civil list surpasses a million of pounds in amount, and as much is allowed to each of the Princesses in one year, as the chief magistrate of America receives in two years, though that country is nearly equal to this in population.

A Mr. Preston, a lawyer of great eminence, and a great praiser of Pitt, has just published a pamphlet, in which is this remark:  ’It should always be remembered, that the eighteen pounds a year paid to any placeman or pensioner, withdraws from the public the means of giving active employment to one individual as the head of a family; thus depriving five persons of the means of sustenance from the fruits of honest industry and active labour, and rendering them paupers.’  Thus this supporter of Pitt acknowledges the great truth that the taxes are the cause of a people’s poverty and misery and degradation.  We did not stand in need of this acknowledgment; the fact has been clearly proved before; but it is good for us to see the friends and admirers of Pitt brought to make this confession.

It has been attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question:  ’If taxes be the cause of the people’s misery, how comes it that they were not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?’ Here is a fallacy which you will be careful to detect.  I know that the taxes have been reduced; that is to say, nominally reduced, but not so in fact; on the contrary, they have, in reality, been greatly augmented.  This has been done by the sleight-of-hand of paper money.  Suppose, for instance, that four years ago, I had a hundred pounds to pay in taxes, then a hundred and thirty bushels of wheat would have paid my share.  If I have now seventy-five pounds to pay in taxes, it will require a hundred and ninety bushels of wheat to pay my share of taxes.  Consequently, though my taxes are nominally reduced, they are, in reality, greatly augmented.  This has been done by the legerdemain of paper money.  In 1812, the pound-note was worth only thirteen shillings in silver.  It is now worth twenty shillings.  Therefore, when we now pay a pound-note to the tax-gatherer, we really pay him twenty shillings where we before paid him thirteen shillings; and the Landholders who lent pound-notes worth thirteen shillings each, are now paid their interest in pounds worth twenty shillings each.  And the thing is come to what Sir Francis Burdett told the Parliament it would come to.  He told them in 1811, that if they ever attempted to pay the interest of their debt in gold and silver, or in paper money equal in value to gold and silver, the farmers and tradesmen must be ruined, and the journeymen and labourers reduced to the last stage of misery.