HOW TO BORROW.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1098, 20 May 1863, Page 6

HOW TO BORROW.

Although there may be some things passing in America which we cannot, perhaps, regard with totally unmixed satisfaction, thtre is much to gratify the patriot of the true spread-eagle order. If things do not go exactly right, there is no denying that they are conducted on a scale the most magnificent the world has ever seen. The job, in every sense of the word, grows bigger and bigger. What strength, what vitality, what resources, what energy must there be in a nation that is able to ruin itself on a

scalc so transcendant and magnificent! We admit that the American mind has had to submit to serious mortifications. Defeat, disunion, the loss of personal liberty, and, still dearer, of personal property, the perpetual summons to put on mourning for some dear friend or relation, are, undoubtedly, real and tangible evils. But then, the thing is done on so magnificent a scale, the dimensions are so vast, the magnitude is so appalling; the national passion for wealth, prosperity, and union is disappointed, but everything tends to gratify what is scarcely a less deeply-rooted feeling in the American mind, —the disinterested love of magnitude for its own sake. If you are to have a blockade, it is a fine thing to blockade a thousand miles of coast at once; if you are to have a war, how glorious to light a conflagration which extends through all the climes and regions from Pennsylvania to Texas ! It is a sad thing to fight a pitched battle, but there is something satisfactory in fighting four or five in the same month on the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Next to not being ruined at all, the finest thing, from the American point of view, is to be ruined on a good scale, —to go down, like the tropical sun, bloocl-red and blazing into the sea, with no pale and ineffective twilight, no shadings or fadings away to extenuate the magnitude of the catastrophe. The latest commercial intelligence received from America must, though not very pleasant in itself, have gratified to the utmost this size worship of the American mind. The telegraph informs us that the Government Bill for the issue of $900,000,000 — more than £180,000,000 sterling—of United States' bonds has passed the Senate. Wall-street is much excited. Gold has reached 42 premium. The ship which brings this intelligence carries away 600,000 dollars in specie to Europe. We do not think that

any one will be found to complain that this sum is not large enough; that it is not fully adequate to the dignity of the free and enlightened people who are anxious to borrow it, and in all respects thoroughly commensurate to the scale of the war to which it is to be devoted. For ourselves, we confess that we feel deeply humiliated by the comparison. When we reflect on the miserable driblets by which Mr. Pitt and other architects, considered not altogether timid or unskilful in their day, built up the goodly fabric of our own National Debt, we undergo the sensation of the frog trying to swell itself to the goodly dimensions of the ox. Alas! who are we that we should venture to criticise the magnificent transactions of which we are the remote and admiring witnesses? All the wars of King William 111. entailed upon us but a paltry debt of £15,000,000. Queen Anne's wars left a burden of only £37,000,000, and we contrived to lose our American provinces after a war of seven years, at the very moderate figure of an increase to our debt of £121,000,000. The great Napoleon himself, after a struggle of two-and-twenty years, only bequeathed us as a keepsake a debt of £603,000,000. These figures used to be thought something, but, like a finite quantity in mathematics when brought into contact with infinity, they absolutely banish and efface themselves when compared for a moment with the grand American style of doing business. Nor are we less impressed by the stupendous calmness with which these debts are incurred. John, Duke of Marlborough, himself did not ride the whirlwind and direct the storm with more complete and absolute equanimity than is displayed by Mr. Chase in these stupendous operations. He has the prettiest way of sketching out his alternatives. Take your choice, ladies and gentlemen; which will you have? Shall it be 300 millions in legal tender notes, with 50 millions in Post-office stamps and 300 millions in three-year notes bearing interest payable to bearer, or shall we go in at once for the grand total of 900 millions? Thus adjured, how could Congress hesitate? The scale is everything, and so of course it took the largest, and may now claim the undisputed honor of offering to a confiding public the largest loan ever created by a single legislative act. It is just like a tale in the ' Arabian Nights,' where a prince, or a shepherd, or a merchant strays casually on to the side of a hill, and suddenly sees before him a palace of a mile square and 500 feet high, made of a single diamond. He always approaches and enters it, just as you would any I ordinary caravansary. He eats, drinks, and otherwise amuses himself, and retires to rest, and rises up in the morning with the most perfect calmness and indifference. He is, to be sure, on enchanted ground, but his mind is reconciled to the change, and you find him, under these extraordinary circumstances, happy in all respects, like the most ordinary mortals. So it is in America; these things, though done by deliberative Assemblies, appear to receive a very moderate amount of deliberation. The great Republic involves herself in these tremendous transactions apparently with as little thought and deliberation as a fast young man about town gives to the subscription of his name to a piece of stamped paper. No nation was ever ruined at once so magnificently and so gaily. There is only one entity in the United States which seems at all to take to heart the awful state of the Finances, and that—to the shame of human nature be it spoken—is not a man nor even an animal, but a cold, impassible chymical compound—that much abused and much coveted metal, Gold. This singular substance displays a sensibility, a life, a keenness of observation, and an alacrity of movement which are wholly wanting elsewhere. So far from being favorably affected by the size of the transaction, that magnitude before which all else in the United States bows down, seems only to inspire it with the livelier panic. It flies from the happy shores of free America, and seeks protection from the terror of Democratic Finance amid the rotten and mouldering despotisms of Monarchical Europe. This precious metal clearly does not know when it is well off. It surrenders its place ignominiously, and leaves paper undisputed master of the field.

Meanwhile, amid all this spending and borrowing and fighting, we hear not a word of the only source from which those funds are to be derived that are destined to support the enormous fabric of credit. We hear not a word of the collection of taxes. At the very moment when America expects to obtain from some quarter or another an amount of credit quite unexampled in the history of the world, she carefully drops out of sight any notice of those taxes by which alone the interest of her loans can be paid. She attends to one thing at once. To borrow is enough for her to think of, without perplexing herself with the disagreeable consideration of how she is to pay what she has borrowed. There is a time for all things—a time for borrowing and a time for paying, and the present is emphatically the borrowing season. To perplex such great operations by giving the public a practical taste of the liability which they involve would be a suicidal measure which no friend of the Union could regard without disgust. People are expected to lend their money on the security of t&xes which they have some reason for supposing it may never be found convenient to levy. The scale of the loan is undoubtedly sufficiently gigantic to gratify the most exacting imagination. But we may, perhaps, be pardoned for thinking that the security is scarcely of commensurate magnitude. Indeed, when we observe the steady flight of whatever is portable and has a money value from the United States across the Atlantic, when we connect this observation with the fact that absolutely no effort is made to raise any appreciable portion of the year's expenditure by the vulgar old-fashioned expedient of taxation, we may, perhaps, be excused for entertaining the suspicion that there does not exist any serious intention of repaying this loan at all. The scale of this transaction would, it is only fair to say, e s m °re magnificent than that of any of which o . ra Jl ave hitherto had experience. It would be a frm; no C 4 to the £ reat war > to the great interminnhi ln ? Umeri \ ble navies > the vast reports, the foX W* deSpatchciS ~ t0 aII - in fact, which has Wnd a lmn S Vrv o i ye^rß , attraCtedtheattention of man " Hit should t0 * he continent of America. It should come to this, that the main bond of the American Confederacy should turn out to be a common lability to an enormous debt, how long irmst we calculate on that bond retaining its force? Is it not only too probable that this community of debt instead of a connecting link, may turn out to be an universal solvent, and that the extreme tranquility with which the momentous transaction is conducted may not be wholly disconnected with the probability of the view which we have indicated?— Times.