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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$24 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM terest alike would share in the general gain As an alternative he proposed that a million should be set aside annually to form a sinking fund, in the expectation that, if a0 new wars broke out, the nation would be relieved of the burden of debt in the course of thirty years’ A somewhat similar scheme was actually set on foot by Sir Robert Walpole®; but he was not sufficiently careful to introduce the necessary safeguards, and to ensure that the money seb aside should be actually devoted to the repayment of debt, and to no other purpose. In the first few years of the existence of this Fund, there was an inconsiderable reduction of total indebtedness®, as the new debts incurred did not quite equal the amounts paid off. After 17383, however, all attempts to keep the Sinking Fund inviolate ceased, and it sompletely changed its character; payments of every sorb for current expenses were habitually charged to it, and ib was replaced, in 1786, by the establishment of the Con- solidated Fund. At that date, out of the £200,607,110 which had been paid to the credit of the Fund during the seventy-two years of its existence, only £23,984,344 had been devoted to its ostensible object’. No real success attended the attempts of financiers to reduce the total of the national obligations, though they were occasionally able, by a process of conversion, to diminish the charges for interest’. They were, moreover, forced to be constantly on the outlook for additional sources of revenue, from which the expenses of government and the payment of interest might be defrayed, and this necessity was the underlying motive for the scheme of taxing the colonists. The fiscal 914. The fiscal system of the country had been entirely stem of reconstructed during the Civil War. The fifteenths and tenths, and the Tudor subsidies, which remained under Charles I., had failed to meet the requirements of Govern- ment. and his opponents had to organise a revenue system A.D. 1689 —1776. ind Walpole endearour- ed to pay off the principal hy means 7 inking Fund. i Hutcheson, Collection of Treatises, pp. 20, 22. 2 Ib. p. 78. 3 3Geo. I. ce. 7,89. i Nathaniel Gould, Essay on the Publick Debts of this Kingdom (1727), in Macculloch, Select Collection of Scarce Tracts on the National Debt, p. 68. 5 Chisholm’s Report in Accounts and Papers, 1868-9, XXXV, 767. 6 In 1717 the rate of interest on Government securities was reduced from 6 to 5 per cent. and in 1727 from 5 to 4 per cent. Bastable. Public Finance, 553.

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