More than four times that sum was now required.

Taxation, both direct and indirect, had been carried to an unprecedented point; yet the income of the state still fell short of the outlay by about a million.

It was necessary to devise something.

Something was devised, something of which the effects are felt to this day in every part of the globe.
There was indeed nothing strange or mysterious in the expedient to which the government had recourse.

It was an expedient familiar, during two centuries, to the financiers of the Continent, and could hardly fail to occur to any English statesman who compared the void in the Exchequer with the overflow in the money market.
During the interval between the Restoration and the Revolution the riches of the nation had been rapidly increasing.