GREAT BRITAIN IN 1817: A BUDGET LESSON. [To THE EDITOR
OF THE " SPECTATOR.") Sia,—I feel that some of your readers may be cheered by a perusal of the f011oWing reflections culled from a work I lately reviewed in detail elsewhere published a century ago by a French admirer of this country and entitled The Truth about England (1817).—I am,
" After the American War," he writes, " it was incessantly remarked that the debt of .2250,000,000= a figure perhaps exceeding the whole capital of the country '—must 'produce inevitable bank-
ruptcy. But what really happened ? Far from becoming insolvent, England met all her engagements, and even accumulated some five hundred and fifty million pounds more, and it is within herself she has discovered this vast extension of credit. For twenty years past Great Britain has been successively engaged in a struggle involving all the Powers of Europe. She has hired er financed them all in twat For three and twenty years she has had to meet a campaign directed against her sea-power, her trade, her very existence.' While every other Government in Europe without exception has either alienated national domains, ' reduced' their obligations, or gone bankrupt inside and out while they have exhausted every form of subtlety or violence—in fine, every device conceivable by ignorance, tyranny, or dishonesty, in the vain hope of securing for a moment an effective and sufficient solvency— England, faced by all kinds of political disaster, has watched her credit broaden and consolidate itself. Nay, the more trying her circumstances the more uniform and unvarying has been the good faith of her Government. It has never hidden front the nation • Bnglishwontan, November, 1917,
the state of its affairs. It has laid bare the abyss that lies befor( and behind them. It has summoned to the rescue of the father. land all the interests, all the feelings, that can animate and sustain the courage of man in the most dangerous of crises. Never despairing of the salvation of Britain and of Europe, it has finally suoceeded in securing from its subjects that complete accord of devotion and sacrifice, that rivalry of helpful effort which has crowned with the most enduring fame the most stupendous and Baring enterprise ever undertaken by any Government in the world.'"
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