However, for argument, I am content to take his state of it.  The debt was and is enormous.  The war was expensive.  The best economy had not perhaps been used.  But I must observe, that war and economy are things not easily reconciled; and that the attempt of leaning towards parsimony in such a state may be the worst management, and in the end the worst economy in the world, hazarding the total loss of all the charge incurred, and of everything along with it.

But cui bono all this detail of our debt?  Has the author given a single light towards any material reduction of it?  Not a glimmering.  We shall see in its place what sort of thing he proposes.  But before he commences his operations, in order to scare the public imagination, he raises by art magic a thick mist before our eyes, through which glare the most ghastly and horrible phantoms: 

    Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse est. 
    Non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei
    Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.

Let us therefore calmly, if we can for the fright into which he has put us, appreciate those dreadful and deformed gorgons and hydras, which inhabit the joyless regions of an imagination fruitful in nothing but the production of monsters.

His whole representation, is founded on the supposed operation of our debt, upon our manufactures, and our trade.  To this cause he attributes a certain supposed dearness of the necessaries of life, which must compel our manufacturers to emigrate to cheaper countries, particularly to France, and with them the manufacture.  Thence consumption declining, and with it revenue.  He will not permit the real balance of our trade to be estimated so high as 2,500,000_l._; and the interest of the debt to foreigners carries off 1,500,000_l._ of that balance.  France is not in the same condition.  Then follow his wailings and lamentings, which he renews over and over, according to his custom—­a declining trade, and decreasing specie—­on the point of becoming tributary to France—­of losing Ireland—­of having the colonies torn away from us.

The first thing upon which I shall observe is,[60] what he takes for granted as the clearest of all propositions, the emigration of our manufacturers to France.  I undertake to say that this assertion is totally groundless, and I challenge the author to bring any sort of proof of it.  If living is cheaper in France, that is, to be had for less specie, wages are proportionably lower.  No manufacturer, let the living be what it will, was ever known to fly for refuge to low wages.  Money is the first thing which attracts him.  Accordingly our wages attract artificers from all parts of the world.  From two shillings to one shilling, is a fall in all men’s imaginations, which no calculation upon a difference in the price of the necessaries of life can compensate.  But it will be hard to prove that a French artificer is better fed, clothed, lodged, and warmed, than one