Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/118

 diminution and final extinction of that long-accustomed investment resource, our once great national debt, whose manner of decline, and whose ultimate death, I am about to relate. As the rate of interest on our debt—by a bold and happy stroke, during one of the recurring intervals of "cheap money" towards the end of the nineteenth century—had been successfully reduced from three per cent. to two and a half per cent., so there was the less difficulty in negociating the Special Trust issues at moderate rates of interest, these being usually not over three per cent.

Let us glance back for a moment to these two great events, which formed national eras in their respective times, and were almost unexpectedly simple in the means by which they were successively accomplished. From the middle of the nineteenth century, a distinguished minister and premier of those remote but not yet forgotten times had made the question of the reduced interest his own; and he happily survived to see his grand expectation realized. When seasons of cheap money came round, so as to send up the price of the old three per cent. consols substantially above par, which happened, in fact, on repeated occasions before the actual step of conversion into two and a half per cent. was ventured upon, there had always seemed to be two great obstacles in