The debt of the United States amounted on 1st August,
1866, to 554,083,0001., being twenty-five millions less than it was on the same date in the year before,—perhaps the most astounding fact in the whole history of finance. This American people, which, according to the Times and the Club-men, was about to be insolvent, has in the year, after a tremendous war, and with half its territory disorganized, raised a revenue greater than that of Great Britain, paid every expenditure, and paid off twenty-five millions of debt, reducing the total nearly one-twentieth. At this rate the war debt will disappear in twenty years, or allowing for the usual rate of American increase, in twelve, a fact we recom- mend to those who believe that democracy always repudiates. Mr. Gladstone, remembering his poor little half-million, must feel terribly envious ; but then anything in the way of taxation can be done with a nation which will allow individual incomes to be published in the newspapers—a practice which strikes Englishmen, whose habit is to exaggerate their incomes to their friends and depreciate them to the tax-collectors, as absolutely revolutionary.
