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.