This was
an arrangement of _their own_, an arrangement made by those who best
knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor
it merited,[23] and how little hopes they had to find any persons in
authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.
But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice,
had not the confidence to propose, they have found a Chancellor of the
Exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them. He has cheered
their drooping spirits. He has thanked the peculators for not despairing
of their commonwealth. He has told them they were too modest. He has
replaced the twenty-five per cent which, in order to lighten themselves,
they had abandoned in their conscious terror. Instead of cutting off the
interest, as they had themselves consented to do, with the fourth of the
capital, he has added the whole growth of four years' usury of twelve
per cent to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this
meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent, to take place from
the year 1781. Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of
Nature. All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation, the
consolidated corruption of ages, the patterns of exemplary plunder in
the heroic times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantic
corruption of this single act.
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