DEBTS OF LEADING NATIONS. The national debt of England is dated generally from the year 1693, with the loan to the Government of the entire capital of the Bank of England. amounting to f1,200,000. In return for this loan the Bank received its charter and priv ileges. The needs of the t;overnment were pressing, and the debt, once started, grew rap idity, as the result of the vigorous foreign policy of William 111. At the accession of the 'House of Hanover, in 1714, it had reached £50.000.000, and it grew throughout the follow ing century. as a result of the several wars in which England found herself engaged. When, in 1793. the great struggle with France began, the debt was £2110.000,000, and when it cc] with the Treaty of Vienna. in ISIS, it had reached the sum of fSq5,000.000. The example set by England was followed by the other Euro• pearl countries. although before the closing years of the eighteenth century few of the States had contracted debts upon any considerable scale.
The Napoleonic struggle, which involved all Eu rope, inaugurated all era of debt for modern States, and the nineteenth century witnessed a rapid growth of national indebtedness. A table compiled by the Bureau of Statistics of the United States Treasury Department, here repro duced, gives the indebtedness of some of the principal nations, and of all the nations of the world combined, since 1800. The table shows that the progress of debt in most countries has been constantly forward. and that, with the ex ception of the United Kingdom and the United States, there has been no conspicuous reduction of the debt. The debt of Great Britain reached its maximum in 1857. when it amounted to £8739,000.000. In the forty-three years since that date the total has been reduced by £190.000,000; but the process of debt reduction has been checked fur the time being by the complications in South Africa,