Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/596

582 this time, therefore, date the greatest wars that we ever waged, the frightfully accumulating weight of taxation, and the creation and growth of the most stupendous debt that the world ever saw. We have just spoken of the real nature of these wars during the period under review, that they were wars for Holland and Germany, not for England. Mr. Spackman, in his Statistical Tables, in 1846, calculated the cost of these foreign wars and their interest to that year as follows.



To this let the reader add thirteen years' more interest, and he will furnish himself with a subject of serious reflection:—

The national debt at the commencement of Dutch William's reign amounted only to the sum of £1,328,526, which Charles II. had robbed London merchants of, and which was not formally recognised as a national debt till 1701, the concluding year of William's reign. It is true there were £680,000 of arrears due to the army at the revolution, and £60,000 of arrears to the late king's servants, but for these there was money enough in the exchequer. At the commencement of William's reign the whole of the national debt was £1,328,526; but, according to the above statement, by the end of the reign of George II. it had grown to £141,500,000! The expenditure occasioned by these wars had risen in these seventy-two years from £2,000,000 a year, which it was the last year of James II., to £8,523,510, which it was in the last year of George II., and in several years of that reign it had been as high as thirteen and fifteen millions. The whole cost of these wars, and the interest of them down to 1846, is the astounding sum of £830,592,500! For these wars of seventy-two years of our Dutch and Hanoverian sovereigns, our posterity will owe in part, and will have paid in interest for these wars very soon, And, besides this, it has been calculated that there were slain in these wars of British alone the following numbers:—

It would puzzle the boldest advocate of wars and of interference in continental quarrels to trace the smallest advantage that this country received for upwards of eight hundred millions of money and nine hundred thousand lives spent by our Dutch and Hanoverian kings in these seventy-two years!