[417] than all the harmonizing influences of modern civilization and Christianity have done to restrain them. Until the system of credit is counterbalanced by some other scheme, by which the persons immediately connected with the public operations shall be impoverished rather than enriched by a state of war, we shall have no occasion to expect the Millennium.
The three most conspicuous examples of the abuse of credit for purposes of war, antecedent to those furnished by the two belligerents in the American conflict, were those of Great Britain, France, and Russia. The debt of the British government at the close of the Napoleonic wars, was eight hundred and eighty-five millions of pounds sterling. In March, 1863, after a lapse of nearly half a century, embracing the costly expenditures of the Crimean war, it had been reduced, by dint of resolute taxation, no lower than the amount of seven hundred and eighty million pounds sterling, or about thirty-nine hundred millions of dollars.
The amount of Assignats issued by the Revolutionary authorities of France, counting all the different series, reached the enormous amount of forty thousand millions of francs.1 These were followed by a second species of paper money called Mandates, to the amount of twenty-four hundred millions of francs. The great bulk of both these forms of circulation, amounting in the aggregate to more than forty-two thousand millions of francs, or eighty-five hundred millions of dollars, proved a loss to their holders; a circumstance which is thought to have been fortunate for France rather than otherwise, in proving the means of divesting her, at the same time with the burden itself, of the spurious authorities that had imposed it.
The British debt was contracted almost altogether in the form of bonds at long dates, upon the faith of which the Bank of England put forth a proportionate amount of its own notes of circulation. It is true that the Exchequer bills issued by government for temporary purposes, went directly into the hands of the public; but they also soon found their way, for the most part, into the Bank of England; and constituted, like the bonds, a basis of additional circulation. In this respect, it will be observed, the English and French systems were essentially different. In England the circulation was not identical with the debentures of government, but was issued through the agency of a banking company, which made of the government bonds a basis for the security of the circulation. In France, the government itself put forth its obligations in the form of a currency, declared it to be the medium of exchange by law, and denounced heavy penalties against the refusal to accept it as money. The comparative merits of the two systems were strikingly exemplified by the result. The French issues, as we have seen, went on augmenting in volume until they reached
