Note 217-3 — Chapter I

If England, for instance, became bankrupt as a nation, the country would not therefore become richer or poorer. The national creditors would lose about £28,000,000 per annum, but the taxpayers would save that sum every year. Now, of the former, there are not 300,000 families; of the latter there are at least 5,000,000. Hence, the loss would there amount to £100 a family per annum, and the gain here to not £6 per family. We may therefore assume with certainty that the two items would not balance each other as to consumption. The creditors of the nation, a numerous, and hitherto a largely consuming class, now impoverished, would be obliged to curtail their demand for commodities of every kind to a frightful extent; while a great many taxpayers would not feel justified in basing an immediate increase of their demand on so small a saving. Other revolutions, more political in character, may operate in the same direction by despoiling a brilliant court, a luxurious nobility or numerous official classes of their former income.