I have said in the foregoing paragraph that there is not gold and silver
enough in the nation to pay the taxes in coin, and consequently that
there cannot be enough in the bank to pay the notes. As I do not choose
to rest anything upon assertion, I appeal for the truth of this to the
publications of Mr. Eden (now called Lord Auckland) and George Chalmers,
Secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantation, of which Jenkinson (now
Lord Hawkesbury) is president.(1) (These sort of folks change their
names so often that it is as difficult to know them as it is to know
a thief.) Chalmers gives the quantity of gold and silver coin from the
returns of coinage at the Mint; and after deducting for the light gold
recoined, says that the amount of gold and silver coined is about twenty
millions. He had better not have proved this, especially if he had
reflected that _public credit is suspicion asleep_. The quantity is much
too little.
1 Concerning Chalmers and Hawkesbury see vol. ii., p. 533.
Also, preface to my "Life of Paine", xvi., and other
passages.---_Editor._.
Of this twenty millions (which is not a fourth part of the quantity of
gold and silver there is in France, as is shown in Mr. Neckar's Treatise
on the Administration of the Finances) three millions at least must be
supposed to be in Ireland, some in Scotland, and in the West Indies,
Newfoundland, &c. The quantity therefore in England cannot be more than
sixteen millions, which is four millions less than the amount of the
taxes. But admitting that there are sixteen millions, not more than
a fourth part thereof (four millions) can be in London, when it is
considered that every city, town, village, and farm-house in the nation
must have a part of it, and that all the great manufactories, which most
require cash, are out of London. Of this four millions in London, every
banker, merchant, tradesman, in short every individual, must have some.
He must be a poor shopkeeper indeed, who has not a few guineas in his
till. The quantity of cash therefore in the bank can never, on the
evidence of circumstances, be so much as two millions; most probably
not more than one million; and on this slender twig, always liable to be
broken, hangs the whole funding system of four hundred millions, besides
many millions in bank notes. The sum in the bank is not sufficient to
pay one-fourth of only one year's interest of the national debt, were
the creditors to demand payment in cash, or demand cash for the bank
notes in which the interest is paid, a circumstance always liable to
happen.
One of the amusements that has kept up the farce of the funding system
is, that the interest is regularly paid. But as the interest is always
paid in bank notes, and as bank notes can always be coined for the
purpose, this mode of payment proves nothing. The point of proof is, can
the bank give cash for the bank notes with which the interest is paid?
If it cannot, and it is evident it cannot, some millions of bank notes
must go without payment, and those holders of bank notes who apply last
will be worst off. When the present quantity of cash in the bank is paid
away, it is next to impossible to see how any new quantity is to arrive.
None will arrive from taxes, for the taxes will all be paid in bank
notes; and should the government refuse bank notes in payment of taxes,
the credit of bank notes will be gone at once. No cash will arise from
the business of discounting merchants' bills; for every merchant will
pay off those bills in bank notes, and not in cash. There is therefore
no means left for the bank to obtain a new supply of cash, after the
present quantity is paid away. But besides the impossibility of paying
the interest of the funded debt in cash, there are many thousand
persons, in London and in the country, who are holders of bank notes
that came into their hands in the fair way of trade, and who are not
stockholders in the funds; and as such persons have had no hand in
increasing the demand upon the bank, as those have had who for their own
private interest, like Boyd and others, are contracting or pretending to
contract for new loans, they will conceive they have a just right that
their bank notes should be paid first. Boyd has been very sly in France,
in changing his paper into cash. He will be just as sly in doing the
same thing in London, for he has learned to calculate; and then it is
probable he will set off for America.
A stoppage of payment at the bank is not a new thing. Smith in his
Wealth of Nations, book ii. chap. 2, says, that in the year 1696,
exchequer bills fell forty, fifty, and sixty per cent; bank notes twenty
per cent; and the bank stopped payment. That which happened in 1696 may
happen again in 1796. The period in which it happened was the last year
of the war of King William. It necessarily put a stop to the further
emissions of exchequer and navy bills, and to the raising of new loans;
and the peace which took place the next year was probably hurried on by
this circumstance, and saved the bank from bankruptcy. Smith in speaking
from the circumstances of the bank, upon another occasion, says (book
ii. chap. 2.) "This great company had been reduced to the necessity
of paying in sixpences." When a bank adopts the expedient of paying in
sixpences, it is a confession of insolvency.
It is worthy of observation, that every case of failure in finances,
since the system of paper began, has produced a revolution in
governments, either total or partial. A failure in the finances of
France produced the French revolution. A failure in the finance of
the assignats broke up the revolutionary government, and produced
the present French Constitution. A failure in the finances of the Old
Congress of America, and the embarrassments it brought upon commerce,
broke up the system of the old confederation, and produced the federal
Constitution. If, then, we admit of reasoning by comparison of causes
and events, the failure of the English finances will produce some change
in the government of that country.
As to Mr. Pitt's project of paying off the national debt by applying
a million a-year for that purpose, while he continues adding more than
twenty millions a-year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg
to run after a hare. The longer he runs the farther he is off.
When I said that the funding system had entered the last twenty years
of its existence, I certainly did not mean that it would continue twenty
years, and then expire as a lease would do. I meant to describe that
age of decrepitude in which death is every day to be expected, and life
cannot continue long. But the death of credit, or that state that is
called bankruptcy, is not always marked by those progressive stages
of visible decline that marked the decline of natural life. In the
progression of natural life age cannot counterfeit youth, nor conceal
the departure of juvenile abilities. But it is otherwise with respect
to the death of credit; for though all the approaches to bankruptcy
may actually exist in circumstances, they admit of being concealed by
appearances. Nothing is more common than to see the bankrupt of to-day a
man in credit but the day before; yet no sooner is the real state of
his affairs known, than every body can see he had been insolvent long
before. In London, the greatest theatre of bankruptcy in Europe, this
part of the subject will be well and feelingly understood.
Mr. Pitt continually talks of credit, and the national resources. These
are two of the feigned appearances by which the approaches to bankruptcy
are concealed. That which he calls credit may exist, as I have just
shown, in a state of insolvency, and is always what I have before
described it to be, _suspicion asleep_.
As to national resources, Mr. Pitt, like all English financiers that
preceded him since the funding system began, has uniformly mistaken the
nature of a resource; that is, they have mistaken it consistently with
the delusion of the funding system; but time is explaining the delusion.
That which he calls, and which they call, a resource, is not a resource,
but is the _anticipation_ of a resource. They have anticipated what
_would have been_ a resource in another generation, had not the use of
it been so anticipated. The funding system is a system of anticipation.
Those who established it an hundred years ago anticipated the resources
of those who were to live an hundred years after; for the people of the
present day have to pay the interest of the debts contracted at that
time, and all debts contracted since. But it is the last feather that
breaks the horse's back. Had the system begun an hundred years before,
the amount of taxes at this time to pay the annual interest at four per
cent. (could we suppose such a system of insanity could have continued)
would be two hundred and twenty millions annually: for the capital of
the debt would be 5486 millions, according to the ratio that ascertains
the expense of the wars for the hundred years that are past. But long
before it could have reached this period, the value of bank notes,
from the immense quantity of them, (for it is in paper only that such
a nominal revenue could be collected,) would have been as low or lower
than continental paper has been in America, or assignats in France; and
as to the idea of exchanging them for gold and silver, it is too absurd
to be contradicted.
Do we not see that nature, in all her operations, disowns the visionary
basis upon which the funding system is built? She acts always by
renewed successions, and never by accumulating additions perpetually
progressing. Animals and vegetables, men and trees, have existed since
the world began: but that existence has been carried on by succession
of generations, and not by continuing the same men and the same trees in
existence that existed first; and to make room for the new she removes
the old. Every natural idiot can see this; it is the stock-jobbing idiot
only that mistakes. He has conceived that art can do what nature cannot.
He is teaching her a new system--that there is no occasion for man to
die--that the scheme of creation can be carried on upon the plan of
the funding system--that it can proceed by continual additions of new
beings, like new loans, and all live together in eternal youth. Go,
count the graves, thou idiot, and learn the folly of thy arithmetic!
But besides these things, there is something visibly farcical in the
whole operation of loaning. It is scarcely more than four years ago
that such a rot of bankruptcy spread itself over London, that the whole
commercial fabric tottered; trade and credit were at a stand; and
such was the state of things that, to prevent or suspend a general
bankruptcy, the government lent the merchants six millions in
_government_ paper, and now the merchants lend the government twenty-two
millions in _their_ paper; and two parties, Boyd and Morgan, men but
little known, contend who shall be the lenders. What a farce is this!
It reduces the operation of loaning to accommodation paper, in which
the competitors contend, not who shall lend, but who shall sign, because
there is something to be got for signing.
Every English stock-jobber and minister boasts of the credit of England.
Its credit, say they, is greater than that of any country in Europe.
There is a good reason for this: for there is not another country in
Europe that could be made the dupe of such a delusion. The English
funding system will remain a monument of wonder, not so much on account
of the extent to which it has been carried, as of the folly of believing
in it.
Those who had formerly predicted that the funding system would break
up when the debt should amount to one hundred or one hundred and fifty
millions, erred only in not distinguishing between insolvency and actual
bankruptcy; for the insolvency commenced as soon as the government
became unable to pay the interest in cash, or to give cash for the bank
notes in which the interest was paid, whether that inability was known
or not, or whether it was suspected or not. Insolvency always takes
place before bankruptcy; for bankruptcy is nothing more than the
publication of that insolvency. In the affairs of an individual, it
often happens that insolvency exists several years before bankruptcy,
and that the insolvency is concealed and carried on till the individual
is not able to pay one shilling in the pound. A government can ward off
bankruptcy longer than an individual: but insolvency will inevitably
produce bankruptcy, whether in an individual or in a government. If then
the quantity of bank notes payable on demand, which the bank has issued,
are greater than the bank can pay off, the bank is insolvent: and when
that insolvency is declared, it is bankruptcy.(*)
* Among the delusions that have been imposed upon the
nation by ministers to give a false colouring to its
affairs, and by none more than by Mr. Pitt, is a motley,
amphibious-charactered thing called the _balance of trade_.
This balance of trade, as it is called, is taken from the
custom-house books, in which entries are made of all cargoes
exported, and also of all cargoes imported, in each year;
and when the value of the exports, according to the price
set upon them by the exporter or by the custom-house, is
greater than the value of the imports, estimated in the same
manner, they say the balance of trade is much in their
favour.
The custom-house books prove regularly enough that so many
cargoes have been exported, and so many imported; but this
is all that they prove, or were intended to prove. They have
nothing to do with the balance of profit or loss; and it is
ignorance to appeal to them upon that account: for the case
is, that the greater the loss is in any one year, the higher
will this thing called the balance of trade appear to be
according to the custom-house books. For example, nearly the
whole of the Mediterranean convoy has been taken by the
French this year; consequently those cargoes will not
appear as imports on the custom-house books, and therefore
the balance of trade, by which they mean the profits of it,
will appear to be so much the greater as the loss amounts to;
and, on the other hand, had the loss not happened, the
profits would have appeared to have been so much the less.
All the losses happening at sea to returning cargoes, by
accidents, by the elements, or by capture, make the balance
appear the higher on the side of the exports; and were they
all lost at sea, it would appear to be all profit on the
custom-house books. Also every cargo of exports that is lost
that occasions another to be sent, adds in like manner to
the side of the exports, and appears as profit. This year
the balance of trade will appear high, because the losses
have been great by capture and by storms. The ignorance of
the British Parliament in listening to this hackneyed
imposition of ministers about the balance of trade is
astonishing. It shows how little they know of national
affairs--and Mr. Grey may as well talk Greek to them, as to
make motions about the state of the nation. They understand
only fox-hunting and the game laws,--_Author_.
I come now to show the several ways by which bank notes get into
circulation: I shall afterwards offer an estimate on the total quantity
or amount of bank notes existing at this moment.
The bank acts in three capacities. As a bank of discount; as a bank of
deposit; and as a banker for the government.
First, as a bank of discount. The bank discounts merchants' bills of
exchange for two months. When a merchant has a bill that will become due
at the end of two months, and wants payment before that time, the bank
advances that payment to him, deducting therefrom at the rate of five
per cent, per annum. The bill of exchange remains at the bank as a
pledge or pawn, and at the end of two months it must be redeemed. This
transaction is done altogether in paper; for the profits of the bank,
as a bank of discount, arise entirely from its making use of paper as
money. The bank gives bank notes to the merchant in discounting the bill
of exchange, and the redeemer of the bill pays bank notes to the bank in
redeeming it. It very seldom happens that any real money passes between
them.
If the profits of a bank be, for example, two hundred thousand pounds a
year (a great sum to be made merely by exchanging one sort of paper
for another, and which shows also that the merchants of that place are
pressed for money for payments, instead of having money to spare to lend
to government,) it proves that the bank discounts to the amount of four
millions annually, or 666,666L. every two months; and as there never
remain in the bank more than two months' pledges, of the value of
666,666L., at any one time, the amount of bank notes in circulation at
any one time should not be more than to that amount. This is sufficient
to show that the present immense quantity of bank notes, which are
distributed through every city, town, village, and farm-house in
England, cannot be accounted for on the score of discounting.
Secondly, as a bank of deposit. To deposit money at the bank means to
lodge it there for the sake of convenience, and to be drawn out at any
moment the depositor pleases, or to be paid away to his order. When
the business of discounting is great, that of depositing is necessarily
small. No man deposits and applies for discounts at the same time;
for it would be like paying interest for lending money, instead of for
borrowing it. The deposits that are now made at the bank are almost
entirely in bank notes, and consequently they add nothing to the ability
of the bank to pay off the bank notes that may be presented for payment;
and besides this, the deposits are no more the property of the bank than
the cash or bank notes in a merchant's counting-house are the property
of his book-keeper. No great increase therefore of bank notes, beyond
what the discounting business admits, can be accounted for on the score
of deposits.
Thirdly, the bank acts as banker for the government. This is the
connection that threatens to ruin every public bank. It is through this
connection that the credit of a bank is forced far beyond what it ought
to be, and still further beyond its ability to pay. It is through this
connection, that such an immense redundant quantity of bank notes, have
gotten into circulation; and which, instead of being issued because
there was property in the bank, have been issued because there was none.
When the treasury is empty, which happens in almost every year of every
war, its coffers at the bank are empty also. It is in this condition of
emptiness that the minister has recourse to emissions of what are called
exchequer and navy bills, which continually generates a new increase of
bank notes, and which are sported upon the public, without there being
property in the bank to pay them. These exchequer and navy bills (being,
as I have said, emitted because the treasury and its coffers at the bank
are empty, and cannot pay the demands that come in) are no other than
an acknowledgment that the bearer is entitled to receive so much money.
They may be compared to the settlement of an account, in which the
debtor acknowledges the balance he owes, and for which he gives a note
of hand; or to a note of hand given to raise money upon it.
Sometimes the bank discounts those bills as it would discount merchants'
bills of exchange; sometimes it purchases them of the holders at the
current price; and sometimes it agrees with the ministers to pay an
interest upon them to the holders, and keep them in circulation. In
every one of these cases an additional quantity of bank notes gets into
circulation, and are sported, as I have said, upon the public, without
there being property in the bank, as banker for the government, to pay
them; and besides this, the bank has now no money of its own; for the
money that was originally subscribed to begin the credit of the bank
with, at its first establishment, has been lent to government and wasted
long ago.
"The bank" (says Smith, book ii. chap. 2.) "acts not only as an ordinary
bank, but as a great engine of State; it receives and pays a greater
part of the annuities which are due to the creditors of the _public_."
(It is worth observing, that the _public_, or the _nation_, is always
put for the government, in speaking of debts.) "It circulates" (says
Smith) "exchequer bills, and it advances to government the annual amount
of the land and malt taxes, which are frequently not paid till several
years afterwards." (This advancement is also done in bank notes,
for which there is not property in the bank.) "In those different
operations" (says Smith) "_its duty to the public_ may sometimes have
obliged it, without any fault of its directors, _to overstock the
circulation with paper money_."--bank notes. How its _duty_ to _the
public_ can induce it _to overstock that public_ with promissory bank
notes which it _cannot pay_, and thereby expose the individuals of that
public to ruin, is too paradoxical to be explained; for it is on
the credit which individuals _give to the bank_, by receiving and
circulating its notes, and not upon its _own_ credit or its _own_
property, for it has none, that the bank sports. If, however, it be the
duty of the bank to expose the public to this hazard, it is at least
equally the duty of the individuals of that public to get their money
and take care of themselves; and leave it to placemen, pensioners,
government contractors, Reeves' association, and the members of both
houses of Parliament, who have voted away the money at the nod of
the minister, to continue the credit if they can, and for which their
estates individually and collectively ought to answer, as far as they
will go.
There has always existed, and still exists, a mysterious, suspicious
connection, between the minister and the directors of the bank, and
which explains itself no otherways than by a continual increase in bank
notes. Without, therefore, entering into any further details of the
various contrivances by which bank notes are issued, and thrown upon the
public, I proceed, as I before mentioned, to offer an estimate on the
total quantity of bank notes in circulation.
However disposed governments may be to wring money by taxes from the
people, there is a limit to the practice established by the nature of
things. That limit is the proportion between the quantity of money in a
nation, be that quantity what it may, and the greatest quantity of taxes
that can be raised upon it. People have other uses for money besides
paying taxes; and it is only a proportional part of the money they can
spare for taxes, as it is only a proportional part they can spare
for house-rent, for clothing, or for any other particular use. These
proportions find out and establish themselves; and that with such
exactness, that if any one part exceeds its proportion, all the other
parts feel it.
Before the invention of paper money (bank notes,) there was no other
money in the nation than gold and silver, and the greatest quantity of
money that was ever raised in taxes during that period never exceeded a
fourth part of the quantity of money in the nation. It was high taxing
when it came to this point. The taxes in the time of William III. never
reached to four millions before the invention of paper, and the quantity
of money in the nation at that time was estimated to be about sixteen
millions. The same proportions established themselves in France. There
was no paper money in France before the present revolution, and the
taxes were collected in gold and silver money. The highest quantity of
taxes never exceeded twenty-two millions sterling; and the quantity of
gold and silver money in the nation at the same time, as stated by M.
Neckar, from returns of coinage at the Mint, in his Treatise on the
Administration of the Finances, was about ninety millions sterling. To
go beyond this limit of a fourth part, in England, they were obliged to
introduce paper money; and the attempt to go beyond it in France, where
paper could not be introduced, broke up the government. This proportion,
therefore, of a fourth part, is the limit which the thing establishes
for itself, be the quantity of money in a nation more or less.
The amount of taxes in England at this time is full twenty millions;
and therefore the quantity of gold and silver, and of bank notes, taken
together, amounts to eighty millions. The quantity of gold and silver,
as stated by Lord Hawkes-bury's Secretary, George Chalmers, as I have
before shown, is twenty millions; and, therefore, the total amount
of bank notes in circulation, all made payable on demand, is sixty
millions. This enormous sum will astonish the most stupid stock-jobber,
and overpower the credulity of the most thoughtless Englishman: but were
it only a third part of that sum, the bank cannot pay half a crown in
the pound.
There is something curious in the movements of this modern complicated
machine, the funding system; and it is only now that it is beginning
to unfold the full extent of its movements. In the first part of its
movements it gives great powers into the hands of government, and in the
last part it takes them completely away.
The funding system set out with raising revenues under the name of
loans, by means of which government became both prodigal and powerful.
The loaners assumed the name of creditors, and though it was soon
discovered that loaning was government-jobbing, those pretended loaners,
or the persons who purchased into the funds afterwards, conceived
themselves not only to be creditors, but to be the _only_ creditors.
But such has been the operation of this complicated machine, the funding
system, that it has produced, unperceived, a second generation of
creditors, more numerous and far more formidable and withal more
real than the first generation; for every holder of a bank note is a
creditor, and a real creditor, and the debt due to him is made payable
on demand. The debt therefore which the government owes to individuals
is composed of two parts; the one about four hundred millions bearing
interest, the other about sixty millions payable on demand. The one is
called the funded debt, the other is the debt due in bank notes.
The second debt (that contained in the bank notes) has, in a great
measure, been incurred to pay the interest of the first debt; so that in
fact little or no real interest has been paid by government. The whole
has been delusion and fraud. Government first contracted a debt, in the
form of loans, with one class of people, and then run clandestinely into
debt with another class, by means of bank notes, to pay the interest.
Government acted of itself in contracting the first debt, and made a
machine of the bank to contract the second. It is this second debt that
changes the seat of power and the order of things; for it puts it in
the power of even a small part of the holders of bank notes (had they no
other motives than disgust at Pitt and Grenville's sedition bills,) to
control any measure of government they found to be injurious to their
interest; and that not by popular meetings, or popular societies, but
by the simple and easy opera-tion of withholding their credit from that
government; that is, by individually demanding payment at the bank
for every bank note that comes into their hands. Why should Pitt and
Grenville expect that the very men whom they insult and injure,
should, at the same time, continue to support the measures of Pitt and
Grenville, by giving credit to their promissory notes of payment? No new
emissions of bank notes could go on while payment was demanding on the
old, and the cash in the bank wasting daily away; nor any new advances
be made to government, or to the emperor, to carry on the war; nor any
new emission be made on exchequer bills.
"_The bank_" says Smith, (book ii. chap. 2) "_is a great engine of
state_." And in the same paragraph he says, "_The stability of the bank
is equal to that of the British government_;" which is the same as to
say that the stability of the government is equal to that of the bank,
and no more. If then the bank cannot pay, the _arch-treasurer_ of the
holy Roman empire (S. R. I. A.*) is a bankrupt. When Folly invented
titles, she did not attend to their application; forever since the
government of England has been in the hands of _arch-treasurers_, it has
been running into bankruptcy; and as to the arch-treasurer _apparent_,
he has been a bankrupt long ago. What a miserable prospect has England
before its eyes!
* Put of the inscription on an English guinea.--_Author_.
Before the war of 1755 there were no bank notes lower than twenty
pounds. During that war, bank notes of fifteen pounds and of ten pounds
were coined; and now, since the commencement of the present war, they
are coined as low as five pounds. These five-pound notes will circulate
chiefly among little shop-keepers, butchers, bakers, market-people,
renters of small houses, lodgers, &c. All the high departments of
commerce and the affluent stations of life were already _overstocked_,
as Smith expresses it, with the bank notes. No place remained open
wherein to crowd an additional quantity of bank notes but among the
class of people I have just mentioned, and the means of doing this
could be best effected by coining five-pound notes. This conduct has the
appearance of that of an unprincipled insolvent, who, when on the verge
of bankruptcy to the amount of many thousands, will borrow as low as
five pounds of the servants in his house, and break the next day.
But whatever momentary relief or aid the minister and his bank might
expect from this low contrivance of five-pound notes, it will increase
the inability of the bank to pay the higher notes, and hasten the
destruction of all; for even the small taxes that used to be paid in
money will now be paid in those notes, and the bank will soon find
itself with scarcely any other money than what the hair-powder
guinea-tax brings in.
The bank notes make the most serious part of the business of finance:
what is called the national funded debt is but a trifle when put in
comparison with it; yet the case of the bank notes has never been
touched upon. But it certainly ought to be known upon what authority,
whether that of the minister or of the directors, and upon what
foundation, such immense quantities are issued. I have stated the amount
of them at sixty millions; I have produced data for that estimation; and
besides this, the apparent quantity of them, far beyond that of gold and
silver in the nation, corroborates the statement. But were there but a
third part of sixty millions, the bank cannot pay half a crown in the
pound; for no new supply of money, as before said, can arrive at the
bank, as all the taxes will be paid in paper.
When the funding system began, it was not doubted that the loans that
had been borrowed would be repaid. Government not only propagated that
belief, but it began paying them off. In time this profession came to be
abandoned: and it is not difficult to see that bank notes will march
the same way; for the amount of them is only another debt under another
name; and the probability is that Mr. Pitt will at last propose
funding them. In that case bank notes will not be so valuable as French
assignats. The assignats have a solid property in reserve, in the
national domains; bank notes have none; and, besides this, the English
revenue must then sink down to what the amount of it was before the
funding system began--between three and four millions; one of which
the _arch-treasurer_ would require for himself, and the arch-treasurer
_apparent_ would require three-quarters of a million more to pay his
debts. "_In France_," says Sterne, "_they order these things better_."
I have now exposed the English system of finance to the eyes of all
nations; for this work will be published in all languages. In doing
this, I have done an act of justice to those numerous citizens of
neutral nations who have been imposed upon by that fraudulent system,
and who have property at stake upon the event.
As an individual citizen of America, and as far as an individual can
go, I have revenged (if I may use the expression without any immoral
meaning) the piratical depredations committed on the American commerce
by the English government. I have retaliated for France on the subject
of finance: and I conclude with retorting on Mr. Pitt the expression he
used against France, and say, that the English system of finance "is on
the verge, nay even in the