It has taken trouble and thought, but the United States
Government has almost succeeded in its grand object of creating a deficit. The total receipts for eleven months of the fiscal year were, according to the Philadelphia corre- spondent of the Times, less than the total expenditure by £1,340,000. The difference is a bagatelle, but the Government of Washington must have been hard put to it to waste on a sufficiently colossal scale. Indeed, it could not have suc- ceeded, but that it has contrived to raise its expenditure on pensions up to the astounding amount of £2,448,000- a month, or £29,296,000 a year, a figure which would have made Louis XV. blush for shame at such plunder of his people. The whole of this vast sum, equal to twice the present interest on the British National Debt, is paid to the actual or reputed survivors of the Army raised for the Civil War, though that Army was not promised pensions, and had no legal claim whatever. The pension-list, before it is cleared, will have cost the United States eighteen times the capital value of the sum spent on the British Monarchy; and then we are told that Democracy is cheap t The sole object of this huge political fraud is to deplete the Treasury, and so protect the system of Protection. Verily Carlyle had reason when he described the human race as- " mostly fools."
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