2

194

It is surprising that any nation on earth should be able to stand under a debt so enormous. No other one could; nor could England herself, if nearly the whole sum were not due to her own citizens. Sooner or later, however, a day of reckoning must come; and a terrible day will that be to England, or at least to her monied aristocracy.

66

What enormous taxes must such a debt impose! nearly $150,000,000 a year to pay simply the interest and management! Taxes," says the Edinburgh Review, "upon every article which enters the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the feet; taxes upon every thing which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell or taste; taxes upon warmth, light and locomotion; taxes upon every thing on the earth, and in the waters under the earth; taxes on every thing that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material, and upon every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce that pampers man's appetite, and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride. Taxes we never escape; at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The school-boy whips his taxed top, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, upon a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent., makes his will on an eight pound stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and then he is gathered to his fathers-to be taxed no more."

There is, however, one important benefit resulting from the British debt. It makes England reluctant to engage in war; and well were Canning and Brougham wont to say, she was under bonds of eight hundred millions sterling to keep the peace. Even she, with all her wealth, could not sustain another series of wars like those she waged against Napoleon and the French. There is now no alternative for her but peace, or bankruptcy and ruin.

II. FRANCE. The history of her debt, written in the blood of her revolutions, it would be very interesting to trace; but it must suffice here to say, that in 1830, it was 4,515,605,834 francs, and in 1840, was slightly reduced to 4,457,736,996.

III. RUSSIA. The resources of this empire are small in comparison with its vast extent, its annual revenue being rated at 380,000,000 rubles, or only about $75,000,000. It is impossible to learn the precise amount of the Russian debt. McCulloch puts it at 956,337,574 rubles; but the Conversation's Lexicon says it amounted in 1840 to 869,411,191 rubles.

The

IV. HOLLAND.-The Dutch are, if possible, worse off than the English. The debt of Holland in 1840 amounted to 800,000,000 German dollars, and that of Belgium to 120,000,000. solvency of Holland is very doubtful; for her expenses since 1830 have almost invariably exceeded her income, and thus her debt has been constantly increasing. The Dutch have tried every expedient to extricate themselves, reducing the perquisites of royalty so low as to make their king little more than a burgomaster, and paring down their protective duties so as to secure the largest possible amount of revenue; yet, after all, bankruptcy is staring them in the face. What a catastrophe for a nation that once stood at the head of the commerce of the world!

V. SPAIN. The profligacy of Spain in repudiating or evading her obligations, renders it impossible to tell how much she now owes; but, according to semi-official statements, her entire debt, in October, 1841, was $775,000,000. This sum is divided into an internal and an external debt. The latter is near $316,000,000, chiefly due to English capitalists; but even the interest has not been paid for a long period.

VI. PORTUGAL.-The financial condition of Portugal resembles that of Spain. Her whole debt amounted in 1840 to 144,500,000 German dollars; and her income the same year was rated at 8,000,000 Spanish dollars, while her expenses were estimated at $11,000,000.

VII. DENMARK.-Of the Danish debt, we can form no certain estimate; but, at the close of 1839, it was put at 62,786,804 rix dollars unfunded debt, 5,390,385 funded debt, and 1,423,841 annuities, with an internal debt of 69,001,031; in all, 134,202,061.

We have not space to give in detail the debts of other countries. The different principalities of Germany owed in 1840, a sum total of 650,000,000 German dollars; Austria, 733,200,000 convention florins; Prussia, 130,000,000 rix dollars; Bavaria, 126,550,907 florins; Naples, 108,000,000 ducats, and Sardinia, 87,000,000 crowns.

The sum total of European debts exceeds ten thousand millions of German dollars; and, if we make due allowance for the countries omitted, and for estimates below the truth, the whole in 1840 would probably not be less than the same number of Spanish dollars. Ten thousand millions! What an amount of war-debts for Europe alone! Five times as much as all the coin on the globe; the bare interest, at six per cent., $600,000,000 a year, almost two millions every day! the simple interest nearly as much every day as all Christendom is giving annually for the spread of the gospel!

These liabilities we call war-debts. So they are; they were contracted almost exclusively for war purposes; had there been no war, there would have been no debt; and, were the war-system now discarded, all Europe could in fifty years, most of her states in far less time, pay off the last farthing of her enormous obligations, and thus start, unfettered and unclogged, upon a new, unparalleled career of prosperity

We subjoin a general view of European debts in German dollars, equal to about eighty-two cents each.

P. S. For further information on this subject, see McGregor's Commercial Legislation, McCulloch's Statistical Dictionary, Hunt's Merchants Magazine for 1843, Conversation's Lexicon der Gegenwart.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS.

RESULTS OF ONE WAR

AMONG NOMINAL CHRISTIANS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

WAR has ever been a mass of evils; and a review of its history would exhibit, in every age and clime, essentially the same results, physical, political and moral. Every reader of history is familiar with the so called Thirty Years' War, which raged in the heart of Europe from 1618 to 1648. It was a religious war, and involved the great mass of Papists and Protestants, the former under their Catholic League, the latter in their Evangelical Union. Schiller, in his history of this war, says, "from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of the Scheldt, from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic, it desolated countries, destroyed harvests, and laid towns and villages in ashes; extinguished, during half a century, the rising progress of civilization in Germany; and reduced the improving manners of the people to their ancient barbarism."

We have been wont to regard the wars consequent on the French Revolution, as teaching lessons of atrocity and horror unknown before; but the following items, taken from the biographer of Wallenstein, furnish some parallels even to the Russian Campaign.

66

Thirty years of war, carried on not with the surplus population and resources of the country, but with its very capital and substance, had brought the empire to the verge of ruin and barbarism; and the pictures of desolation handed down to us by writers and chroniclers of the period, are absolutely frightful to contemplate.

Of all the commanders who appeared during the war, Gustavus Adolphus was alone able to preserve in his army a strict and humane system of discipline. In most of the armies, the mercenary soldiers, irregularly paid, and worse supplied, were obliged to tear by force from the citizens and peasants, the means of subsistence. The country people resisted wherever they were strongest; acts of violence followed; the peasantry slew and, in Catholic countries, tortured straggling soldiers, and attacked even small detached parties. The military avenged their comrades, neglecting too often to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, till ruin and devastation tracked at last the progress of every march.

The war was carried on without plan or system. Expeditions were undertaken, apparently with no other view than to desolate hostile provinces; and, in the end, provisions and winter quarters formed the principal objects of the summer campaigns. Want,

P. T. NO. XXV.

sickness, distress, and the total absence of discipline, by which these evils were fearfully augmented, destroyed far more troops than the sword, and entire armies were swept away before they had even seen an enemy. Soldiers left the ranks singly, or in bands, as it suited them, and generally took to plundering; in 1642 the whole of Marshall Gubriant's army dispersed itself, and broke into robber hordes that committed the most fearful depredations.

The enormities charged against the French troops of the period, are equal to those charged even against the Croats; but Gubriant's army was in fact the remains of the army which had been raised by the Duke of Weimar, and was composed of adventurers from all countries. It must also be observed, that the French soldiers of the early part of the seventeenth century, were in a great proportion vagrants and vagabonds, taken up as bad subjects by the police, and sent to the army, either because troops were wanted, or because the individuals pressed could give no satisfactory account of themselves.

Historians mostly assert, that Europe was thrown back a whole century by the ruinous consequences of this war. In many parts of Germany learning was no doubt retarded, in others altogether swept away along with the population. An entire generation grew up amid scenes of strife, licentiousness, and the uncertainty of the morrow. But the amount of knowledge existing could not be destroyed; and thousands of learned, able and industrious Germans emigrated, and carried along with them into other and less enlightened countries, the arts and knowledge for which their own was already distinguished. The Danes, Swedes, Poles and Scots, who fought in Germany, there came in contact with a state of civilization superior to what existed in their own countries; and, along with much unworthy spoil, some fair and honorable booty would at least be carried home by the military adventurers.

But, whatever advantage Europe may have gained by the contest, Germany purchased its share of the benefit at a fearful price. Law, justice, equity, in many places, all the decencies of life, had entirely vanished from a land in which force alone wielded the arbitrary sceptre of command. The country is said to have lost twelve millions of inhabitants by the contest; and the population, which amounted to sixteen millions when the troubles first broke out, counted hardly more than four millions when the war closed! Though this statement may perhaps be exaggerated, it seems pretty well ascertained that the population of the Dutchy of Wirtemberg was reduced from half a million to forty-eight thousand; that of Bohemia had already been reduced from three millions to eight hundred and ninety thousand before the death of Ferdinand II.; and Saxony and Brunswick suffered in the same proportion;a reduction in one case of nearly three-fourths, in another of more than nine-tenths!

In the Electorate of Hesse, seventeen towns, forty-seven castles, and three hundred villages had been burnt to the ground. In the