Paper Against Gold Author:William Cobbett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: : as new wars came on, new sums were borrowed; and, as lending money to the Government was found to be a profitable trade ; as so many persons of influence f... more »ound their advantage in the loaning transactions, the money was always easily enough raised. But, yet there continued to be a tain of paying off the Debt; and, in time, a part of the yearly taxes were set aside for that purpose, which part of the taxes soiset aside was called a SINKING FUND. These being words, which, as belonging to our present subject, are of vast importance, it is necessary for us to have a clear notion of their meaning. The word Fund, as was before observed in Letter II. page 13, means a quantity of money put together for any purpose ; and, in the instance before us, the word Sinking appears to have been prefixed to the word Fund in order to characterise, or describe, the particular purpose, or use, of the taxes so set apart; namely, the purpose of sinking, or reducing, or diminishing, or les sening, the Debt. So that the Sinking Fund, of which we have all heard so much, and of which most of us have known so little, means, in other words, in words better to be understood, a Lessening Fund; and whether the thing has, in its operation, hitherto, answered to its name, we shall by-and-by see, if, indeed, we have not seen enough to satisfy us upon this point in the increasing of the Debt, as exhibited in the foregoing Letter. The amount of taxes thus set apart, or, to use the words with which we must now grow familiar, the Sinking Funds, which were, time after time, established, were, in many cases, applied to other purposes than that for which they were destined, or intended. Indeed, they seem, for many years, to have been very little better than purses made up at one time and spent again at another, ...« less