The following was the table of the issues under each reign:

Geo. I. in 1727 (one year),£370,000
Geo. II. from 1727 to 1760 (33 years),11,500,000
Geo. III. from 1760 to 1820 (60 years),542,500,000
Geo. IV. from 1820 to 1831 (11 years),320,000,000
Will. IV. from 1831 to 1837 (6 years),160,000,000
Victoria I. from 1837 to 1840 (4 years),160,000,000
£1 140,370,000

Near twelve hundred millions of pounds sterling in less than a century and a quarter—we may say three-quarters of a century, for the great mass of the issues have taken place since the beginning of the reign of George III. The first issue was the third of a million; under George II., the average annual issue was the third of a million; under George III., the annual average was nine millions; under George IV. it was thirty millions; under William IV. twenty-three millions; and under Victoria, it is twenty-one millions. Such is the progress of the system—such the danger of commencing the issue of paper money to supply the wants of a government.

This, continued Mr. B., is the fruit of the exchequer issues in England, and it shows both the rapid growth and dangerous perversion of such issues. The first bills of this kind ever issued in that country were under William III., commonly called the Prince of Orange, in the year 1696. They were issued to supply the place temporarily of the coin, which was all called in to be recoined under the superintendence of Sir Isaac Newton. The first bills were put out by King William only for this temporary purpose, and were issued as low as ten pounds and five pounds sterling. It was not until more than thirty years afterwards, and when corporation credit had failed, that Sir Robert Walpole revived the idea of these bills, and perverted them into a currency, and into instruments for raising money for the service of the government. His practice was to issue these bills to supply present wants, instead of laying taxes or making a fair and open loan. When due, a new issue took up the old issue; and when the quantity would become great, the whole were funded; that is to say saddled upon posterity. The fruit of the system is seen in the 900,000,000 of debt which Great Britain still owes, after all the payments made upon it. The amount is enormous, overwhelming, appalling; such as never could have been created under any system of taxes or loans. In the nature of things government expenditure has its limits when it has to proceed upon taxation or borrowing. Taxes have their limit in the capacity of the people to pay: loans have their limit in the capacity of men to lend; and both have their restraints in the responsibility and publicity of the operation. Taxes cannot be laid without exciting the inquiry of the people. Loans cannot be made without their demanding wherefore. Money, i. e. gold and silver, cannot be obtained, but in limited and reasonable amounts, and all these restraints impose limits upon the amount of government expenditure and government debt. Not so with the noiseless, insidious, boundless progress of debt and expenditure upon the issue of government paper! The silent working of the press is unheard heard by the people. Whether it is one million or twenty millions that is struck, is all one to them. When the time comes for payment, the silent operation of the funding system succeeds to the silent operation of the printing press; and thus extravagant expenditures go on—a mountain of debt grows up—devouring interest accrues—and the whole is thrown upon posterity, to crush succeeding ages, after demoralizing the age which contracted it.

The British debt is the fruit of the exchequer system in Great Britain, the same that we are now urged to adopt, and under the same circumstances; and frightful as is its amount, that is only one branch—one part of the fruit—of the iniquitous and nefarious system. Other parts remain to be stated, and the first that I name is, that a large part of this enormous debt is wholly false and factitious! McCulloch states two-fifths to be fictitious; other writers say more; but his authority is the highest, and I prefer to go by it. In his commercial dictionary, now on my table, under the word "funds," he shows the means by which a stock for £100 would be granted when only £60 or £70 were paid for it; and goes on to say:

"In consequence of this practice, the principal of the debt now existing amounts to nearly two-fifths more than the amount actually advanced by the lender."

So that the English people are bound for two-fifths more of capital, and pay two-fifths more of annual interest, on account of their debt than they ever received. Two-fifths of 900,000,000 is 360,000,000; and two-fifths of 30,000,000 is 12,000,000; so that here is fictitious debt to the amount of $1,600,000,000 of our money, drawing $60,000,000 of interest, for which the people of England never received a cent; and into which they were juggled and cheated by the frauds and villanies of the exchequer and funding systems! those systems which we are now unanimously invited by our administration to adopt. The next fruit of this system is that of the kind of money, as it was called, which was considered lent, and which goes to make up the three-fifths of the debt admitted to have been received; about the one-half of it was received in depreciated paper during the long bank suspension which took place from 1797 to 1823, and during which time the depreciation sunk as low as 30 per centum. Here, then, is another deduction of near one-third to be taken off the one-half of the three-fifths which is counted as having been advanced by the lenders. Finally, another bitter drop is found in this cup of indebtedness, that the lenders were mostly jobbers and gamblers in stocks, without a shilling of their own to go upon, and who by the tricks of the system became the creditors of the government for millions. These gentry would puff the stocks which they had received—sell them at some advance—and then lend the government a part of its own money. These are the lenders—these the receivers of thirty millions sterling of taxes—these the scrip nobility who cast the hereditary nobles into the shade, and who hold tributary to themselves all the property and all the productive industry of the British empire. And this is the state of things which our administration now proposes for our imitation.

This is the way the exchequer and funding system have worked in England; and let no one say they will not work in the same manner in our own country. The system is the same in all countries, and will work alike every where. Go into it, and we shall have every fruit of the system which the English people now have; and of this most of our young States, and of our cities, and corporations, which have gone into the borrowing business upon their bonds, are now living examples. Their bonds were their exchequer bills. They used them profusely, extravagantly, madly, as all paper credit is used. Their bonds were sold under par, though the discount was usually hid by a trick: pay was often received in depreciated paper. Sharpers frequently made the purchase, who had nothing to pay but a part of the proceeds of the same bonds when sold. And thus the States and cities are bound for debts which are in a great degree fictitious, and are bound to lenders who had nothing to lend; and such are the frauds of the system which is presented to us, and must be our fate, if we go into the exchequer system.

I have shown the effect of an exchequer of issues in Great Britain to strike paper money for a currency, and as a substitute for loans and taxes. I have shown that this system, adopted by Sir Robert Walpole upon the failure of corporation credit, has been the means of smuggling a mountain load of debt upon the British people, two-fifths of which is fraudulent and fictitious; that it has made the great body of the people tributaries to a handful of fundholders, most of whom, without owning a shilling, were enabled by the frauds of the paper system and the funding system, to lend millions to the government. I have shown that this system, thus ruinous in England, was the resort of a crafty minister to substitute government credit for the exhausted credit of the moneyed corporations, and the exploded bubbles; and I have shown that the exchequer plan now presented to us by our administration, is a faithful copy of the English original. I have shown all this; and now the question is, shall we adopt this copy? This is the question; and the consideration of it implies the humiliating conclusion, that we have forgot that we have a constitution, and we have gone back to the worst era of English history—to times of the South Sea bubble, to take lessons in the science of political economy. Sir, we have a Constitution! and if there was any thing better established than another, at the time of its adoption, it was that the new government was a hard-money government, made by hard-money men, who had seen and felt the evils of government paper, and who intended for ever to cut off the new government from the use of that dangerous expedient. The question was made in the Convention (for there was a small paper money party in that body), and solemnly decided that the government should not emit paper money, bills of credit, or paper currency of any kind. It appears from the history of the Convention, that the first draft of the constitution contained a paper clause, and that it stood in connection with the power to raise money; thus: "To borrow money, and emit bills, on the credit of the United States." When this clause came up for consideration, Mr. Gouverneur Morris moved to strike out the words, "and emit bills," and was seconded by Mr. Pierce Butler. "Mr. Madison thought it sufficient to prevent them from being made a tender." "Mr. Ellsworth thought this a favorable moment to shut and bar the door against paper money. The mischief of the various experiments which had been made, were now fresh in the public mind, and had excited the disgust of all the respectable part of America. By withholding the power from the new government, more friends of influence would be gained to it than by almost any thing else. Paper money can in no case be necessary. Give the government credit, and other resources will offer. The power may do harm, never good." Mr. Wilson said: "It will have a most salutary influence on the credit of the United States, to remove the possibility of paper money. This expedient can never succeed while its mischiefs are remembered; and as long as it can be resorted to, it will be a bar to other resources." "Mr. Butler remarked that paper was a legal tender in no country in Europe. He was urgent for disarming the government of such a power." "Mr. Read thought the words, if not struck out, would be as alarming as the mark of the beast in Revelations." "Mr. Langdon had rather reject the whole plan than retain the three words, 'and emit bills.'" A few members spoke in favor of retaining the clause; but, on taking the vote, the sense of the convention was almost unanimously against it. Nine States voted for striking out: two for retaining.

If there were a thousand constitutional provisions in favor of paper money, I should still be against it—against the thing itself, per se and propter se—on account of its own inherent baseness and vice. But the Constitution is against it—clearly so upon its face; upon its history; upon its early practice; upon its uniform interpretation. The universal expression at the time of its adoption was, that the new government was a hard money government, made by hard money men, and that it was to save the country from the curse of paper money. This was the universal language—this the universal sentiment; and this hard money character of the new government was one of the great recommendations in its favor, and one of the chief inducements to its adoption. All the early action of the government conformed to this idea—all its early legislation was as true to hard money as the needle is to the pole. The very first act of Congress for the collection of duties on imports, passed in the first year of the new government's existence, and enacted by the very men who had framed the Constitution—this first act required those duties to be paid "in gold and silver coin only;" the word only, which is a contraction for the old English onely, being added to cut off the possibility of an intrusion, or an injection of a particle of paper money into the Treasury of the United States. The first act for the sale of public lands required them to be paid for in "specie"—the specie circular of 1836 was only the enforcement of that act; and the hard money clause in the independent treasury was a revival of these two original and fundamental revenue laws. Such were the early legislative interpretations of the Constitution by the men who made it; and corresponding with these for a long time after the commencement of the government, were the interpretations of all public men, and of no one more emphatically than of him who is now the prominent member of this administration, and to whose hand public opinion attributes the elaborate defence of the Cabinet Exchequer plan which has been sent down to us. In two speeches, delivered by that gentleman in the House of Representatives in the year 1816, he thus expressed himself on the hard money character of our government, and on the folly and danger of the paper system: