FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS.
On the 29th of January Lord Henry Petty, as chancellor of the exchequer, submitted to the house an estimate of the supplies required for the year, and of the ways and means by which he proposed to meet them. The expenditure was calculated at a grand total of £45,841,340, being £40,527,065 for Great Britain, and £5,314,275 for Ireland. Lord Petty’s plan of finance, in order to meet this expenditure, assumed that the annual produce of the permanent and temporary revenue would continue equal to the produce of the preceding year; keeping these premises in view, Lord Petty proposed that the war-loans for this year and the two next should be £12,000,000 annually; for 1810, £14,000,000, and for the next ten years £16,000,000. These loans were to be made a charge on the war-taxes, which were estimated to produce £21,000,000 annually, and this charge was to be at the rate of ten per cent, on each loan, five per cent, interest, and the remainder as a sinking-fund, which at compound interest would redeem any sum of capital debt in fourteen years. Lord Petty said that the portion of war-taxes thus liberated successively might, if war continued, become applicable in a revolving series, and be again pledged for new loans. It was material, however, he explained that the property-tax should cease on the sixth of April next, after peace was ratified, and that on the result of the whole measure there would not be any new taxes imposed for the first three years from this time. All that was necessary would be new taxes, of less than £300, 000, on an average of seven years from 1810 to 1816, inclusive. This, he continued, would procure for the country the full benefit of the plan proposed, which plan would be continued for twenty years, during the last ten of which no additional taxes would be required. This plan after repeated discussions was agreed to, and the funds rose so high in consequence, that the chancellor of the exchequer was able to negociate a loan on advantageous terms to the public.