A state of the national debt, as it stood December the 24th, 1716. With the payments made towards the discharge of it out of the sinking fund, &c. compared with the debt at Michaelmas, 1725.

First edition. 8vo. [4], 83, [1, blank], [28, Appendix] pp. With the half title. Recent quarter calf with marbled paper covered boards, spine with five single raised bands outlined in gilt, second panel lettered in gilt on red morocco label (dust-soiling to title, trimmed close at the fore margin of Appendix just shaving the occasional character, paper repair to verso of terminal leaf just touching several characters of the word 'Freeholder' without loss). London, printed for R. Francklin, under Tom’s Coffee-House, Covent Garden.

An anonymous pamphlet attributed to William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (1684-1764) excoriating the fiscal record of Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole who had sought to reduce the interest on the national debt by creating a national sinking fund. The pamphlet demonstrates 'a shrew appreciation of the details of Locke's monetary theory' and was still well-regarded by John Ramsay McCulloch over a century later who 'considered of sufficient merit to reprint it for the members of the Political Economy Club' (p. 202, 206).

Pulteney was a 'formidable figure in early eighteenth-century economic writing. He is of a stature comparable to, say, the figures of Child and Barbon in the literature of the seventeenth century, but he is, of course, rarely acknowledged as such. His identification as author therefore focuses on the importance of his omission from general accounts of the history of classical economic thought, a blemish of some importance in the accuracy of that historical record' (Groenewegen, p. 203-204)

See: Peter Groenewegen, Eighteenth-century Economics: Turgot, Beccara and Smith and their contemporaries.

Goldsmiths’, 6553; Hanson, 3736.

Stock Code: 244361