and instead of the proceeds of the clearings being used for the purchase of new tracts, instead of the cleared tracts being replanted as quickly as possible—instead, in a word, of the damage to the capital value of the State forests being balanced by an addition to their capital value, the quickly earned profits had been devoted to the payment of current expenses and the redemption of bonds. Of course there could be no doubt that a reduction of the National Debt was only too desirable; but the critics expressed the opinion that that was not the time to devote extraordinary revenues to the building up of the sinking-fund.
Anybody who had no interest in mincing matters must have described the State finances as in a hopeless muddle. The country carried a debt of thirty million pounds—it struggled along under it with patience and devotion, but with secret groans. For the burden, much too heavy in itself, was made trebly heavy through a rise in the rate of interest and through conditions of repayment such as are usually imposed on a country whose credit is shaken, whose exchange is low, and which has already almost come to be reckoned as "interesting" in the world of financiers.
The succession of financial crises appeared to be never-ending. The list of failures seemed without beginning or end. And a maladministration, which was made no better by frequent changes in its personnel, regarded borrowing as the only cure for the creeping sickness in the State finances. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, von Schröder, whose probity and singleness of purpose were beyond all doubt, had been given a peerage by the Grand Duke, because he had succeeded in placing a loan at a high rate of interest in the most difficult circumstances. His heart was set on an improvement in the credit of the State: but as his resource was to contract new debts while he paid off the old, his policy proved to be no better than a well-meant but costly blind. For a simultaneous sale and
