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THE

BRITISH REVIEW,

AND

LONDON CRITICAL JOURNAL.

OCTOBER, 1813.

ART. I.-An Inquiry concerning the Rise, Progress, the Redemption and present State, and the Management of the National Debt of Great Britain. By Robert Hamilton, L. L. D. F. R. S. E. Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen. 1813.

IN our last Number we announced our intention of reviewing the work of Professor Hamilton, on the "Rise and Progress, the Redemption and present State, and the Management of the Public Debt of Great Britain."

The subject is extremely important, and, in our view of it, embraces a very wide field of inquiry into the means by which, during more than a century, we have been enabled not only to bear immense and constantly increasing public expences, but have at the same time become far more politically powerful, and abounding in private wealth (that is, in all the necessaries and even superfluities of civil life, and the means of obtaining them), than in any former period of our history.

Public and private wealth are, without doubt, the very lifeblood of our political existence; and the long contest in which we have successfully encountered with dauntless front and unwearied vigour the enemies of the civilized world, must have been insupportable, if by some means or other our pecuniary resources had not been made productive in full proportion to the unexampled magnitude of our expences.

During great part of twenty anxious years, armies and navies have been maintained by Britain, scarcely less numerous, and

VOL. V. NO. IX.

B

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