$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.