Interest paid by France, funded and
    unfunded, for perpetuity or on lives,
    after the tax of 10 per cent L6,500,000
  Interest paid by England, as stated by
    the author, p. 27 4,600,000
          
                                      ----------
  Interest paid by France exceeds that
    paid by England L1,900,000

The author cannot complain, that I state the interest paid by England as too low.  He takes it himself as the extremest term.  Nobody who knows anything of the French finances will affirm that I state the interest paid by that kingdom too high.  It might be easily proved to amount to a great deal more:  even this is near two millions above what is paid by England.

There are three standards to judge of the good condition of a nation with regard to its finances. 1st, The relief of the people. 2nd, The equality of supplies to establishments. 3rd, The state of public credit.  Try France on all these standards.

Although our author very liberally administers relief to the people of France, its government has not been altogether so gracious.  Since the peace, she has taken off but a single vingtieme, or shilling in the pound, and some small matter in the capitation.  But, if the government has relieved them in one point, it has only burdened them the more heavily in another.  The Taille,[65] that grievous and destructive imposition, which all their financiers lament, without being able to remove or to replace, has been augmented no less than six millions of livres, or 270,000 pounds English.  A further augmentation of this or other duties is now talked of; and it is certainly necessary to their affairs:  so exceedingly remote from either truth or verisimilitude is the author’s amazing assertion, that the burdens of France in the war were in a great measure temporary, and must be greatly diminished by a few years of peace.

In the next place, if the people of France are not lightened of taxes, so neither is the state disburdened of charges.  I speak from very good information, that the annual income of that state is at this day thirty millions of livres, or 1,350,000_l._ sterling, short of a provision for their ordinary peace establishment; so far are they from the attempt or even hope to discharge any part of the capital of their enormous debt.  Indeed, under such extreme straitness and distraction labors the whole body of their finances, so far does their charge outrun their supply in every particular, that no man, I believe, who has considered their affairs with any degree of attention or information, but must hourly look for some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system:  the effect of which on France, and even on all Europe, it is difficult to conjecture.

In the third point of view, their credit.  Let the reader cast his eye on a table of the price of French funds, as they stood a few weeks ago, compared with the state of some of our English stocks, even in their present low condition:—­