They contrive to make a show at the expense of
the tailors, and appear clean at the charge of the washer-women.
England, has at this time, nearly two hundred million pounds
sterling of public money in paper, for which she has no real property:
besides a large circulation of bank notes, bank post bills, and
promissory notes and drafts of private bankers, merchants and
tradesmen. She has the greatest quantity of paper currency and the
least quantity of gold and silver of any nation in Europe; the real
specie, which is about sixteen millions sterling, serves only as
change in large sums, which are always made in paper, or for payment
in small ones. Thus circumstanced, the nation is put to its wit's end,
and obliged to be severe almost to criminality, to prevent the
practice and growth of forgery. Scarcely a session passes at the Old
Bailey, or an execution at Tyburn, but witnesses this truth, yet
you, sir, regardless of the policy which her necessity obliges her
to adopt, have made your whole army intimate with the crime. And as
all armies at the conclusion of a war, are too apt to carry into
practice the vices of the campaign, it will probably happen, that
England will hereafter abound in forgeries, to which art the
practitioners were first initiated under your authority in America.
You, sir, have the honor of adding a new vice to the military
catalogue; and the reason, perhaps, why the invention was reserved for
you, is, because no general before was mean enough even to think of
it.
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