Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/255

Rh N A T N A T 243 but his position in the Fourth Gospel has given rise to a prevalent conjecture that Nathanael is the true name of the apostle whose patronymic was Bartholomew (son of Ptolemy). This indeed is mere conjecture, and recent writers have advanced rival hypotheses, e.g., that the name is another form for Mattaniah or Matthew (Hilgenfeld), or that Nathanael is identical with the beloved disciple of the Fourth Gospel (Spath) or even a mere symbol of Paulinism (Holtzmann). NATICK, a town of the United States, in Middlesex county, Massachusetts, near the left bank of the Charles Kiver, a few miles to the south-east of Cochituate Lake, and about 18 miles west-south-west of Boston by the railway between that city and Worcester. It is mainly engaged in the manufacture of boots and shoes, but also produces clothing, boxes, and carriages. The population in 1880 was 8480. Natick (&quot;our land&quot;) was in 1650 granted to John Eliot, the Indian &quot;Apostle,&quot; for the occupancy of Indians converted to Chris tianity ; and until 1721 the community was governed by a consti tution modelled on that of Exodus xviii. Portions of the records, written in the Indian language, are extant. The site of the first Indian church is now occupied by the Unitarian church. Of the Natick Indians only four or five remain, all of mixed blood. The incorporation of the town dates from 1781. NATIONAL DEBT. Details as to the national debts of individual countries are given under their respective headings, and for the economical principles of the subject the reader is referred to the articles FINANCE and POLITICAL ECONOMY. In the present article the subject will be con sidered briefly in what may be regarded as its technical aspects, including the special character of the institution, the different classes of debt, the various methods of raising loans, interest, funding systems, comparative statistics of national debts, methods of estimating the burden of debt, and other points. National debt is so universal an institution that it has been described as the first stage of a nation towards civiliza tion. A nation, so far as its finances are concerned, may be regarded as a corporate body or even as an individual. Like the one or the other it may borrow money at rates of interest, and with securities, general or special, propor tionate to its resources, credit, and stability. But, while in this respect there are certain points of analogy between a state and an individual, there are important points of difference so far as the question of debt is concerned. A state, for example, may be regarded as imperishable, and its debt as a permanent institution which it is not bound to liquidate at any definite period, the interest, unless specially stipulated, being thus of the nature of transf errible permanent annuities. While an individual who borrows engages to pay interest to the lender personally, and to reimburse the entire debt within a certain date, a state may have an entirely different set of creditors every six months, and may make no stipulation whatever with regard to the principal. A state, moreover, is the sole judge of its own solvency, and is not only at liberty either to repudiate its debts or compound with its creditors, but even when perfectly solvent may materially alter the con ditions on which it originally borrowed. These distinctions explain many of the peculiarities of national debts as con trasted with those of individuals, though a nation, like an individual, may by reckless bad faith utterly destroy its credit and exhaust its borrowing powers. A well-organized state ought to have within itself the means of meeting all its ordinary expenses ; where this is not the case, either through insufficiency of resources or maladministration, and where borrowing is resorted to for what may be regarded as current expenses, a state imperils, not only its credit, but, when any crisis occurs, its very existence ; in illustration of this we need only refer to the cases of Turkey in Europe and some of the states of Central and South America. Even for meeting emer gencies it is not always inevitable that a state should incur debt ; its ordinary resources, from taxation or from state property, may so exceed its ordinary expenses as to enable it to accumulate a fund for extraordinary con tingencies. This, it would seem, was a method commonly adopted in ancient states. The Athenians, for example, amassed 10,000 talents in the interval between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, and the Lacedaemonians are said to have done the same. At Susa and Ecbatana Alexander found a great treasure which had been accumu lated by Cyrus. In the early days of Home the revenue from certain sources was accumulated as a sacred treasure in the temple of Saturn ; and we know that when Pompey left Italy he made the mistake of leaving behind him the public treasury, which fell into the hands of Caesar. In later times, also, the more prudent emperors were in the habit of amassing a hoard. We find that the method of accumulating reserves prevailed among some of the early French kings, even down to the time of Henry IV. This system has long prevailed in Prussia, and even at the present day exists to some extent in reconstituted Germany. Frederick II., when he ascended the throne, found in the treasury a sum of 8,700,000 thalers, and it is estimated that at his death he left behind him a hoard of from 60 to 70 million thalers. And similarly, in our own time, of the five milliards of indemnity paid by France as a result of the Franco-German War, 150 millions were set apart to reconstitute the traditional war-treasury. The German empire, apart from the individual states which comprise it, had in 1882 a debt of about 24,000,000, while its invested funds amounted to 37,390,000, including a war-treasure of 6,000,000. The majority of economists disapprove of such an accumula tion of funds by a state as a bad financial policy, main taining that the remission of a proportionate amount of taxation would be much more for the real good of the nation. At the same time the possession of a moderate war-fund, it must be admitted, could not but give a state a great advantage in the case of a sudden war. In the case of England, apart from the private hoardings of a few sovereigns, there does not seem to have existed any deliberately accumulated public treasure ; before the time of William and Mary English monarchs borrowed money occasionally from Jews and from the city of London, but emergencies were generally met by &quot;benevolences&quot; and increased imposts. All modern states, it may be said, have been compelled to have recourse to loans, either to meet war expenses, to carry out great public undertakings, or to make up the recurrent deficits of a mismanaged revenue. Resources obtained in this way are what constitute national debt proper. Loans have been divided into forced and voluntary. Forced loans can, of course, only be raised within the bounds of the borrowing country ; and, apart from the injustice which is sure to attend such an impost, it is always economically mischievous. The loans which the kings of England were wont to exact from the Jews were really of the character of forced loans, though the method has never been used in England in modern times so extensively as on the Continent. There the sum sought to be obtained in this way has never been anything like realized. In 1793, for example, a loan of this class was imposed in France, on the basis of income ; and of the milliard (francs) which it was sought to raise only 1 00 millions were realized. In Austria and Spain, also, recourse has been had at various times to forced loans, but invariably with unsatisfactory results. Other methods of a more or less compulsory character have been and are