| THE NATIONAL DEBT.
We need not say that an official “Return of the
Whole Amount of the National Debt of Great Britain and Ireland,”
and its annual progress since its formation, has a portentous look about
it. The great leaps of our national debt, however, are marked and distinct,
and own one great uniform impulse, - war, war, war. There is a war, and
it immediately stirs; there is peace, and it stops; there is war, and
it goes on again. The history of our debt is the history of our wars.
Charles
II handed over a public debt of 664,268 l. to his successor.
That small sum was the original basis of our national debt; the secret
of borrowing once learnt, the application of it was easy, and the seed
had a steady and large growth. In 1691 it had reached a sum of 3,000,000
l. The war with France raised it, in 1697,
to 14,000,000 l, at which sum it stood for three years, when
the war of the Spanish succession, in 1702, took it
up. This war, before it had done with it, made it 34,000,000 l.
The war with Spain, which began in 1718 and lasted three
years, left it 54,000,000. The peace of eighteen years, which the country
enjoyed under the mild, though not exactly Saturnian*, sway of Sir
Robert Walpole, reduced these figures to 46,000,000 l; but
the war of right of search with Spain and the war
of the Austrian succession left them in 1748 raised to the threatening
sum of 75,000,000 l. After a stationary interval of eight years
the seven years’ war took the plant under its
fostering hand, and presented the debt in 1763 almost exactly doubled
– i.e., advanced to the good round sum of 130,000,000 l.
After another stationary interval of peace the American
war came, and nearly doubled the figures as they stood at the end
of the preceding war. Leaving the debt in 1784 raised to the sum of 240,000,000
l. The ten years’ peace which followed was the introduction
to the great French War, when we began borrowing in
earnest. Up to this epoch we were children comparatively in the art, though
certainly promising children; now the mature genius of manhood took up
the early lesson, and showed what real proficiency was. We almost date
the national debt in our minds from the French war, as if the preceding
amount were a mere retaining fee not worth speaking about; and well we
may; twenty years nearly quadrupled the whole collective growth of a century,
and left the national debt more than a heavy sum of a round sum –
viz, the almost mythical sum of 860,000,000 l. The forty years’
peace took nearly 100,000,000 l. from this monster, but the Russian
war put half of it on again, and now we stand at 805,000,000 l.
The l symbol used in this article represents the
£ (pounds sterling) and comes from L which stands for the Latin
"libre".
*Saturnian - Roman Myth of or pertaining to Saturn,
whose age or reign, from the mildness and wisdom of his government is
called the golden age e.g. resembling the golden age; distinguished
for peacefulness, happiness, contentment. The Right Honourable Robert
Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford (1676-1745)
WARS with BRITAIN in this article*
The War of the Grand Alliance (also known as the War
of the League of Augsburg, the Nine Years War, the Orleans War, the
War of the Palatinian Succession, and the War of the English Succession)
was a major war fought in Europe and America from 1688 to 1697, between
France and the League of Augsburg — which, by 1689, was known
as the "Grand Alliance". The war was fought to resist French
expansionism along the Rhine, as well as, on the part of England, to
safeguard the results of the Glorious Revolution from a possible French-backed
restoration of James II.
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The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)
was a major European armed conflict that arose in 1701 after the death
of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II. Charles had bequeathed
all of his possessions to Philip, duc d'Anjou (Philip V), a grandson
of the French King Louis XIV. The war began slowly, as the Holy Roman
Emperor Leopold I fought to protect his own dynasty's claim to the Spanish
inheritance. As Louis XIV began to expand his territories more aggressively,
however, other European nations (chiefly England and the Republic of
the Seven United Netherlands) entered on the Holy Roman Empire's side
to check French expansion (and, in the English case, to safeguard the
Protestant succession). Other states joined the coalition opposing France
and Spain in an attempt to acquire new territories, or to protect existing
dominions. The war was fought not only in Europe, but also in North
America, where the conflict became known to the English colonists as
Queen Anne's War.
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The War of the Quadruple Alliance was a minor European
war fought between 1718 and 1720, mostly in Italy, between Spain on
the one side, and the Quadruple Alliance of Austria, France, Great Britain,
and the United Provinces. The conflict occurred as a result of the ambitions
of King Philip V of Spain, his wife, Isabella Farnese, and his chief
minister Giulio Alberoni in Italy, where the Spanish had traditional
claims and Isabella several dynastic claims to advance; and for the
crown of France, where Philip's infant nephew Louis XV was King, and
his cousin the Duc d'Orléans was Regent. Opposition to Philip's
ambitions led France, Britain, and The Seven United Netherlands, to
join together in the Triple Alliance on January 4, 1717, and in November
of that year Philip made war on Emperor Charles VI by invading the island
of Sardinia, given to Austria by the Treaty of Utrecht ending the War
of the Spanish Succession. Shortly thereafter, the Spanish advanced,
invading Sicily, which had been awarded to the Duke of Savoy.
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The War of Jenkins' Ear was a conflict between Great
Britain and Spain that lasted from 1739 to 1748. After 1742 it merged
into the larger War of the Austrian Succession. Under the 1729 Treaty
of Seville, the British had agreed not to trade with the Spanish colonies.
To verify the treaty, the Spanish were permitted to board British vessels
in Spanish waters. After one such incident in 1731, Robert Jenkins,
captain of the ship Rebecca, claimed that the Spanish coast guard had
severed his ear, and in 1738 exhibited it to the House of Commons —
hence the name of the conflict. The British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole,
reluctantly declared war on October 23, 1739.
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The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748)
became inevitable after Maria Theresa of Austria had succeeded her father
Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor in his Habsburg dominions in 1740, namely
becoming Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria, and Duchess
of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. For a woman to inherit such vast
territories involved many complications, which were perceived long before,
and Emperor Charles VI had long anticipated them, getting all the other
powers to agree to the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. The plan was for
her to succeed to the hereditary Habsburg domains, and her husband,
Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, to be elected Holy Roman Emperor.
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The Seven Years' War (1756–1763), some of whose
theatres are called the Pomeranian War and the French and Indian War,
was hailed by Winston Churchill as the first world war, as it was the
first conflict in human history to be fought around the globe. The war
involved all major powers of Europe: Prussia, Great Britain (with British
Colonies in North America), and Hanover were pitted against Austria,
France (with New France), Russia, Sweden, and Saxony. Spain and Portugal
were later drawn into the conflict, while a force from the neutral United
Provinces of the Netherlands was attacked in India. The most tangible
outcome of the war was the end of France’s power in the Americas
(having only four islands left to them) and the emergence of Great Britain
as the most powerful colonial power in the world.
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The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), also
known as the American War of Independence, was a conflict that erupted
between Great Britain and revolutionaries within thirteen British colonies,
who declared their independence as the United States of America in 1776.
The war was the culmination of the American Revolution, a colonial struggle
against political and economic policies of the British Empire. The war
eventually widened far beyond British North America; many Native Americans
also fought on both sides of the conflict
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The Great
French War (Conflicts between 1792-1815)
The Great French War is a sometimes-used term to describe
the period of conflict beginning on April 20, 1792 and continuing until
November 20, 1815. The conflict began when France declared war on Austria
following a gradual increase in tensions following the French Revolution
in 1789. The wars continued through several régime changes in
France (beginning with the deposition of King Louis XVI in 1792 and
continuing through the Terror instigated by the Jacobins under Maximilien
de Robespierre). The Jacobins were in turn overthrown and an Executive
Directory set up, eventually also giving way to the rule of Napoleon
Bonaparte - first as First Consul then as Emperor. The period of the
war prior to the seizure of power by Bonaparte in 1799 is generally
referred to as the Revolutionary Wars and the period afterward is known
as the Napoleonic Wars.
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The Crimean War lasted from 28 March 1854 until 1856
and was fought between Imperial Russia on one side and an alliance of
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Second French Empire,
the Kingdom of Sardinia, and (to some extent) the Ottoman Empire on
the other. The majority of the conflict took place on the Crimean peninsula
in the Black Sea.
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*SOURCE: - Extracts from Wikipedia. For
further readings visit Wikipedia
(the free encyclopedia).
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