Excerpt from Currency Inflation and Public Debts: An Historical Sketch The first problem is intimately connected with the growth Of public indebtedness. The utilization of pub lic credit is essentially a modern phenomenon. Public debts do not go back more than a century or two, and it is only in very recent times that they figure largely in economic life. Public credit has been utilized in ia creasing measure not only because modern business life lays continually more stress on credit, but also because under the dynamic conditions Of a rapidly augmenting national wealth the weight Of a given public debt tends gradually to diminish. Public credit is not only a natural, but within bounds a salutary, phenomenon. Public debts are in reality nothing but anticipated taxes, and if the distribution Of the holdings of the debt were exactly equal to the distribution of the weight Of taxa tion, public debts would constitute no burden on the community: for every dollar paid by the individual in taxes would be compensated by the dollar received by him in interest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.