The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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122 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM political advantage to the country, in the long run, has pro- yoked an immense amount of discussion’. Various writers have held that each generation should make immediate but there provision? out of taxation for paying off the debt incurred was a real ” . 3 danger of by any wars in which they had engaged, and that it was imposing unfair to burden posterity with the cost of their under- posterity gakings?, But it was often plausible to urge that after- generations were gainers by the struggles in which their fathers engaged, and that it was entirely just that the burden should be distributed over a long period of years. If the funds are used in connection with some contest which involves the very existence of the nation, there is much to be said for this view: but the precise benefit ac- A.D. 1689 ~1776. 1 The public mind has become habituated to the existence of national debts, but the case against them occasionally finds a vigorous exponent, especially in view of the decline of Holland, which was regarded as due to the pressure of the taxation which was necessary in order to meet the interest on the debt. “Up to times of comparatively modern and recent date, therefore, the idea of any persons, in a real national exigence, when perhaps national existence was at stake, offering to lend money to their country ‘at interest,’ was deemed just as absurd as would be a child offering to lend its pocket-money to its father ‘at interest,’ when both were in danger of wanting a dinner! It was reserved for what is strangely termed ‘an enlightened era,’ to hatch this monstrous absurdity, which, until it was put into practice, would not have been deemed wicked, but silly. Strange turn for matters to take at an ‘enlightened era’; and stranger still, that such & notion should first strike root in the skull of a countryman of ‘ Grotins’: but so it was. It was in the muddy and huckstering brain of a Dutchman, some- where about the middle of the seventeenth century, that this pestilent scheme was engendered; and in the huckstering country of Holland was first presented lo the eyes of the world the spectacle of a ‘National Debt.’ The ‘Lernaean Fens’ engendered the ‘Hydra’; and amidst the swamps of the ‘ Zuyder Zee' was generated this far worse than the fabled monster of the poets! After all, however, the soil is sufficiently worthy of the tree. The Dutch, though they have produced one or two great men, are a nation remarkable for low, peddling, greedy, and huckstering notions; but they have this excuse, that, being a small and weak state, they have been continually, by their position, compelled to make efforts beyond their strength; and this it was, no doubt, which first tempted them to plunge into that most preposterous and wicked system, of which I am now to give the detail. With a country almost naturally defenceless, engaged by position and religion in conflicts far beyond their real national strength, surrounded by strong and often hostile powers, the Dutch at length became so exhausted by the pressure of the taxes they paid, as to sacrifice before the shrine of mammon those liberties which they had preserved from ambition.” Doubleday, Financial, Monetary and Statistical History of England, 43. Compare also the writers quoted by Macculloch, Dictionary, s.v. Holland. 2 An attempt in this direction was made by the Acts 8 and 9 W. IIL c. 20 § 41. 8 Davenant, 1. 80. He thought it specially unfair in England, +b. 256. This principle is laid down by Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence, elc., Iv. 200.

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