PREFACE.
To gather the many remarkable incidents connected with the National Debt; to present an anecdotical sketch of the causes which necessitated, and the corruptions which increased it; to reproduce its principal characters; to detail the many evils of lotteries; to relate the difficulties in the early history of railways; to popularize those loans, of which the Poyais, with its melancholy tragedy, and the Greek, with its whimsical transactions, were such striking exemplars; and to group these subjects around the Stock Exchange, is the object of a portion of the present volume.
Any work which tends to familiarize the origin and progress of the National Debt, which shows that it was raised for no idle cause, and increased for no trifling purpose, may be useful in the consideration of that encumbrance which must, sooner or later, be reduced or repudiated.
The volume does not profess to be statistical,—there are abundant works of a financial kind upon the subject. Mr. Van Sommer’s valuable Tables, to which the writer acknowledges his obligations, and which, with Mr. Wilkinson’s Law of the Public Funds, should be possessed by every member of the Stock Exchange; the works of McCulloch, of Hamilton, of Grellier, of Fenn, render such a production unnecessary. The present volume is a popular narrative of the money power of England, intended to be at once interesting and suggestive.
Shooter’s Hill.
Shooter’s Hill.