the deficiencies of grants and funds; Mr. Touchet’s claim; the debts due to Nova Scotia and Barbadoes; exchequer bills; and navy debt.  The extreme fallacy of this state cannot escape any reader who will be at the pains to compare the interest money, with which he affirms us to have been loaded, in his “State of the Nation,” with the items of the principal debt to which he refers in his “Considerations.”  The reader must observe, that of this long list of nine articles, only two, the exchequer bills, and part of the navy debt, carried any interest at all.  The first amounted to 1,800,000_l._; and this undoubtedly carried interest.  The whole navy debt indeed amounted to 4,576,915_l._; but of this only a part carried interest.  The author of the “Considerations,” &c. labors to prove this very point in p. 18; and Mr. G. has always defended himself upon the same ground, for the insufficient provision he made for the discharge of that debt.  The reader may see their own authority for it.[56]

Mr. G. did in fact provide no more than 2,150,000_l._ for the discharge of these bills in two years.  It is much to be wished that these gentlemen would lay their heads together, that they would consider well this matter, and agree upon something.  For when the scanty provision made for the unfunded debt is to be vindicated, then we are told it is a very small part of that debt which carries interest.  But when the public is to be represented in a miserable condition, and the consequences of the late war to be laid before us in dreadful colors, then we are to be told that the unfunded debt is within a trifle of ten millions, and so large a portion of it carries interest that we must not compute less than 3 per cent upon the whole.

In the year 1764, Parliament voted 650,000_l._ towards the discharge of the navy debt.  This sum could not be applied solely to the discharge of bills carrying interest; because part of the debt due on seamen’s wages must have been paid, and some bills carried no interest at all.  Notwithstanding this, we find by an account in the journals of the House of Commons, in the following session, that the navy debt carrying interest was, on the 31st of December, 1764, no more than 1,687,442_l._ I am sure therefore that I admit too much when I admit the navy debt carrying interest, after the creation of the navy annuities in the year 1763, to have been 2,200,000_l._ Add the exchequer bills; and the whole unfunded debt carrying interest will be four millions instead of ten; and the annual interest paid for it at 4 per cent will be 160,000_l._ instead of 299,250_l._ An error of no small magnitude, and which could not have been owing to inadvertency.