Citizens, a great deal has been urged respecting insurrections. I am confident that no man has a greater abhorrence of them than myself, and I am sorry that any insinuations should have been thrown out upon me as a promoter of violence of any kind. The whole tenor of my life and conversation gives the lie to those calumnies, and proves me to be a friend to order, truth and justice.
I hope you will attribute this effusion of my sentiments to my anxiety for the honor and success of the revolution. I have no interest distinct from that which has a tendency to meliorate the situation of mankind. The revolution, as far as it respects myself, has been productive of more loss and persecution than it is possible for me to describe, or for you to indemnify. But with respect to the subject under consideration, I could not refrain from declaring my sentiments.
In my opinion, if you subvert the basis of the revolution, if you dispense with principles, and substitute expedients, you will extinguish that enthusiasm and energy which have hitherto been the life and soul of the revolution; and you will substitute in its place nothing but a cold indifference and self-interest, which will again degenerate into intrigue, cunning, and effeminacy.
But to discard all considerations of a personal and subordinate nature, it is essential to the well-being of the republic that the practical or organic part of the constitution should correspond with its principles; and as this does not appear to be the case in the plan that has been presented to you, it is absolutely necessary that it should be submitted to the revision of a committee, who should be instructed to compare it with the Declaration of Rights, in order to ascertain the difference between the two, and to make such alterations as shall render them perfectly consistent and compatible with each other.
XXVI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENGLISH SYSTEM OF FINANCE.(1)
"On the verge, nay even in the gulph of bankruptcy."
1 This pamphlet, as Paine predicts at its close (no doubt on
good grounds), was translated into all languages of Europe,
and probably hastened the gold suspension of the Bank of
England (1797), which it predicted. The British Government
entrusted its reply to Ralph Broome and George Chalmers, who
wrote pamphlets. There is in the French Archives an order
for 1000 copies, April 27, 1796, nineteen days after Paine's
pamphlet appeared. "Mr. Cobbett has made this little
pamphlet a text-book for most of his elaborate treatises on
our finances.... On the authority of a late Register of Mr.
Cobbett's I learn that the profits arising from the sale of
this pamphlet were devoted [by Paine] to the relief of the
prisoners confined in Newgate for debt."—"Life of Paine,"
by Richard Carlile, 1819.—Editor..
Debates in Parliament.
Nothing, they say, is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying; yet we can always fix a period beyond which man cannot live, and within some moment of which he will die. We are enabled to do this, not by any spirit of prophecy, or foresight into the event, but by observation of what has happened in all cases of human or animal existence. If then any other subject, such, for instance, as a system of finance, exhibits in its progress a series of symptoms indicating decay, its final dissolution is certain, and the period of it can be calculated from the symptoms it exhibits.
Those who have hitherto written on the English system of finance, (the funding system,) have been uniformly impressed with the idea that its downfall would happen some time or other. They took, however, no data for their opinion, but expressed it predictively,—or merely as opinion, from a conviction that the perpetual duration of such a system was a natural impossibility. It is in this manner that Dr. Price has spoken of it; and Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, has spoken in the same manner; that is, merely as opinion without data. "The progress," says Smith, "of the enormous debts, which at present oppress, and will in the long run most probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe [he should have said governments] has been pretty uniform." But this general manner of speaking, though it might make some impression, carried with it no conviction.