In speaking of a foreign revenue, the very pretence to accuracy would be the most inaccurate thing in the world.  Neither the author nor I can with certainty authenticate the information we communicate to the public, nor in an affair of eternal fluctuation arrive at perfect exactness.  All we can do, and this we may be expected to do, is to avoid gross errors and blunders of a capital nature.  We cannot order the proper officer to lay the accounts before the House.  But the reader must judge on the probability of the accounts we lay before him.  The author speaks of France as raising her supplies for war by taxes within the year; and of her debt, as a thing scarcely worthy of notice.  I affirm that she borrowed large sums in every year; and has thereby accumulated an immense debt.  This debt continued after the war infinitely to embarrass her affairs; and to find some means for its reduction was then and has ever since been the first object of her policy.  But she has so little succeeded in all her efforts, that the perpetual debt of France is at this hour little short of 100,000,000_l._ sterling; and she stands charged with at least 40,000,000 of English pounds on life-rents and tontines.  The annuities paid at this day at the Hotel de Ville of Paris, which are by no means her sole payments of that nature, amount to 139,000,000 of livres, that is to 6,318,000_l._; besides billets au porteur, and various detached and unfunded debts, to a great amount, and which bear an interest.

At the end of the war, the interest payable on her debt amounted to upwards of seven millions sterling.  M. de la Verdy, the last hope of the French finances, was called in, to aid in the reduction of an interest, so light to our author, so intolerably heavy upon those who are to pay it.  After many unsuccessful efforts towards reconciling arbitrary reduction with public credit, he was obliged to go the plain high road of power, and to impose a tax of 10 per cent upon a very great part of the capital debt of that kingdom; and this measure of present ease, to the destruction of future credit, produced about 500,000_l._ a year, which was carried to their Caisse d’amortissement or sinking fund.  But so unfaithfully and unsteadily has this and all the other articles which compose that fund been applied to their purposes, that they have given the state but very little even of present relief, since it is known to the whole world that she is behindhand on every one of her establishments.  Since the year 1763, there has been no operation of any consequence on the French finances; and in this enviable condition is France at present with regard to her debt.

Everybody knows that the principal of the debt is but a name; the interest is the only thing which can distress a nation.  Take this idea, which will not be disputed, and compare the interest paid by England with that paid by France: