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 statement,) of $13,000,000, independent of payment of interest, balances, and loans. Yet with all these incumbrances, created under the most usurious exactions, it is greatly to her honor that she has not repudiated the claims of her creditors;—a moral and political firmness in which she may well be emulated by some of those very States that have been loudest in their thoughtless abuse of a sister Republic.

A late Mexican paper states, that the Minister of the Treasury of Mexico has published a decree, by which the President directs twenty-five per cent. of all the receipts of the Custom Houses of the Republic to be set apart as a "sinking fund", to pay the public debt. This fund is to be inviolable. The decree provides for the consolidation and funding of the debt at the rate of a six per cent. stock, for which it will be exchanged by such as choose. Those who do not embrace this arrangement with the Government are to have their claims liquidated, only, when out of the sinking fund now created, those who accede to the exchange of stock, shall have been first of all paid!

If we exclude the American debt, now in the course of payment, (an exclusion nevertheless improper, as the Government has but changed her responsibility from a foreign creditor to a domestic one,) the debt of Mexico may still be fairly estimated at $82,000,000, which, at six per cent., bears an annual interest of $4,920,000. The actual income from customs and all resources may be set down at $13,000,000—25 per cent. on which will produce a fund of $3,250,000, or $1,670,000 less than the interest on the whole debt! It may well be asked whence is to proceed the "sinking fund" so long as such a deficiency exists?