ABSTRACT
In the August 22, 1818 issue of the antigovernment newspaper The Political Register, political journalist and government gadfly William Cobbett presented his readers with a rather unusual solution for what he saw as the problem of British ministerial despotism. What if, he asked, counterfeiters were to print millions of pounds worth of Bank of England banknotes, but rather than secretly trying to pass these off as real money, “they were generously to throw their money by night, about the streets” and stuff handfuls of the bills into letters? The next morning the nation would find itself awash in money, and anyone with pockets would fancy him- or herself a millionaire, at least for a moment. But in relatively short order, the system of paper money would collapse: “All money transactions would be at a stand. No buying, no selling.” Flooding the streets with counterfeit bills would enable the imagination to grasp paper money as a social system, rather than a natural fact of life, and as people imagined to themselves the effects of such a massive increase in currency, money would cease to function as the invisible medium of exchange as its contingency was exposed—for “who, from that day forth, would ever take a Bank Note?” Cobbett acknowledged that the collapse of this social system would cause extreme hardship for those whose wealth depended upon financial speculation: “[t]hree hundred thousand families of Fundholders would be pennyless in an hour, and starving in a week.” But Cobbett, who had railed against British paper money for almost a decade, argued that exposing the contingency of paper money would lead to a cascade of therapeutic destruction, as social system after social system collapsed: the fall of the system of paper money would in turn 2destroy the “borough system,” as well as the system of British state finance that depended upon the Bank of England and the national debt. A massive campaign of forgery, Cobbett contended, would shatter these linked systems of government corruption, since nothing could “save the system from the effects of such a blow…a blow a million times surer than that of a thousand daggers all striking at once.”
