I take it, that whoever considers any man’s expenditure of his income, old or new, (I speak of certain classes in life,) will find a full third of it to go in taxes, direct or indirect.  If so, this new-created income of two millions will probably furnish 665,000_l._ (I avoid broken numbers) towards the payment of its own interest, or to the sinking of its own capital.  So it is with the whole of the public debt.  Suppose it any given sum, it is a fallacious estimate of the affairs of a nation to consider it as a mere burden.  To a degree it is so without question, but not wholly so, nor anything like it.  If the income from the interest be spent, the above proportion returns again into the public stock; insomuch that, taking the interest of the whole debt to be twelve million three hundred thousand pound, (it is something more,) not less than a sum of four million one hundred thousand pound comes back again to the public through the channel of imposition.  If the whole or any part of that income be saved, so much new capital is generated,—­the infallible operation of which is to lower the value of money, and consequently to conduce towards the improvement of public credit.

I take the expenditure of the capitalist, not the value of the capital, as my standard; because it is the standard upon which, amongst us, property, as an object of taxation, is rated.  In this country, land and offices only excepted, we raise no faculty tax.  We preserve the faculty from the expense.  Our taxes, for the far greater portion, fly over the heads of the lowest classes.  They escape too, who, with better ability, voluntarily subject themselves to the harsh discipline of a rigid necessity.  With us, labor and frugality, the parents of riches, are spared, and wisely too.  The moment men cease to augment the common stock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or their self-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to pay contribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, but because they are unproductive.  If, in fact, the interest paid by the public had not thus revolved again into its own fund, if this secretion had not again been absorbed into the mass of blood, it would have been impossible for the nation to have existed to this time under such a debt.  But under the debt it does exist and flourish; and this flourishing state of existence in no small degree is owing to the contribution from the debt to the payment.  Whatever, therefore, is taken from that capital by too close a bargain is but a delusive advantage:  it is so much lost to the public in another way.  This matter cannot, on the one side or the other, be metaphysically pursued to the extreme; but it is a consideration of which, in all discussions of this kind, we ought never wholly to lose sight.