"People," said he, "judge of this second issue by the success of the first; but they will not perceive that the wants of commerce, checked by the Revolution, naturally caused our first conventional issue to be received with avidity; and these wants were such that, in my opinion, this currency would have been adopted had it even not been forced. To ground an argument, however, on this first success, in favor of a second and more ample issue, is to expose ourselves to great dangers. The assignats will undoubtedly have characters of security which no paper-money ever had none was ever created upon so valuable a pledge, clothed with so solid a security but still it must be admitted that never will any national paper be upon a par with the metals, never will the supplementary sign of the first representative sign of wealth have the exact value of its model; the very title proves want, and want spreads alarm and distrust around it. Why will assignat money be always below specie? In the first place, because there will always be doubts of the exact application of its proportions between the mass of the assignats and that of the national property; be cause there will long be uncertainty respecting the consummation of the sales; because no conception can be formed by what time two thousand millions of assignats, representing nearly the value of the domains, will be extinguished; because money being put in competition with paper, both become a marketable commodity, and the more abundant any commodity is the lower must be its price; because with money one will always be able to do without assignats, whilst it is impossible with assignats to do without money; and, fortunately, the absolute want of money will keep some specie in circulation, for it would be the greatest of all evils to be absolutely destitute of it."

Much more in the same strain did the

listen at the time neither to threats nor remonstrances; and in the face of all Talleyrand's warnings and appeals, a new issue of eight hundred millions was ordered, with the new and important proviso, that the notes should no longer carry interest. This marked the second stage in the history, and having described these preliminary steps with some minuteness, we may glance more rapidly over what is to follow.

With a security so tangible as that of the assignats, it might have been expected that they would have maintained their nominal value for at least a considerable length of time. To the confiscated domains of the church was by and by added the property of the loyal emigrants, consisting not only of lands, but of houses and shares, with whatever movables, in the shape of furniture and jewels, they had been unable to carry along with them; and it cannot be doubted that if these had been sold at a reasonable rate, they would have brought more than enough to meet the expenses of the gov ernment during the first years of the Revolution. But notwithstanding this apparently favorable state of the public assets, the paper fell soon and rapidly.

One cause of this has already been indicated the inconvertibility of the security; but other things concurred with that in accelerating the decline; for example, the people had no confidence that the assignats which had been made to serve their original purpose-which had been paid into the treasury in exchange for value received-would be withdrawn from circulation. In one case, a quantity was known to be re-issued, and as what was done once might be done twen ty times, the act gave a cast of insincerity and untrustworthiness to the entire scheme. Besides, what was done by the authorities, with the design of checking the fall, had actually the effect of rendering it more swift. In August, 1793, a silver franc was worth six francs in assig nats, and two consequences, of course, followed-coin was hoarded, and the prices of every other species of commod ity were raised. But instead of accepting these results as inevitable, the gov ernment, with that unhappy tendency to

meddle which has always been characteristic of French rulers, attempted forcibly to mend the matter. A law was passed, making it punishable to exchange a certain quantity of gold or silver for a more considerable quantity of assignats; in other words, all were required, under a penalty, to regard the paper franc and the metal franc as equal in value; and when this failed to bring down the price of bread by raising the worth of the assignat, the artificial law of the maximum was enacted; that is to say, commodities were not allowed to find or make their own price in the market; the price was fixed for them, in each commune, by the municipal authorities; and the baker or the butcher who charged more than the legal sum for his pound of bread or meat, was liable to be taken up as an offender, and subjected to fine and imprisonment. These regulations were well meant, but, as might have been expected, they worse than failed to maintain the value of the paper-money. It could not but be felt that an article which required such extraordinary aids to keep it afloat, must have an inherent and irremediable tendency to sink, and the depreciation went on accordingly.

Under these circumstances, a state of things was brought about which in some respects strikingly resembled that which we have recently been witnessing in America. All debtors became naturally eager to pay off their incumbrances; and creditors, forced to accept what was due to them in greenbacks, got back no more than perhaps a sixth part of what they lent. Then large holders of assignats, knowing that such capital was perpetually melting away in their hands, made attempts in every direction to exchange them for something of inherent or less-varying value, and a fictitious briskness was thus communicated to trade. These men would buy anythingpictures, furniture, bills of exchange on foreign countries, or shares in stocks, or banks, or companies, which last-mentioned species of property rose, in consequence of this demand, to previously unimaginable rates or quotations. They even scrambled for the possession of a kind of assignat which was supposed to be less subject to sink than its neighbors; this was the assignat of the first issue, which, because it dated from the days of

royalty, and bore upon its face the king's image and superscription, was believed to be certain to retain its value even in the case of a counter-revolution. But the necessity of seeking such investments led naturally to something other than the revival of what we may call legitimate commerce; there followed in the train, speculation of the wildest description. The heart of Paris became the Exchange; and such gambling in gold and silver, and other commodities, occurred there, as we can find a parallel to nowhere, except, perhaps, in Wall-street, New-York.

The part of Nero fiddling over Rome in flames is reäcted in every age; it was so in France during the revolutionary era. There, men grew rich on the misfortunes of their country, and drank deepest of the cup of pleasure when a defeat or some other calamity had filled the heart of the nation with grief; and so it is in America at the present hour. If we are to believe the accounts which reach us through the public press, the number of those who, in New-York and Washington, have become suddenly rich, has never been greater, and at no period has there been, in those cities, so much gayety and display and extravagance as has appeared of late among the contractors and speculators who have become millionaires through the national distress.

It must not, however, be supposed that the price of the assignat tended invariably downwards; on the contrary, it fluctuated just as the price of the greenback does now; and, indeed, at one time it recovered itself so remarkably, that for a very short period it was nearly on a par with specie. The causes of this extraordinary revival were these: in the first place, a forced loan was decreed, by which it was expected so much money would be realized as to allow the administration to withdraw as many as a thousand millions from the paper circulation, and anything that had a tendency to lessen the mass helped so far to enhance its intrinsic value. But what contributed more effectually than this to the end referred to, was the increased stringency with which the laws relating to hoarding were enforced. It was made penal to possess a private store of metals. If any one were discovered with a stock of the contraband commodity in his house, the treasure-trove was seized, and divided

between the government and the informer. It thus became positively dangerous to have gold or silver; and hence a perfect rush was made to get rid of them. They were carried to the frontier, and paid away for foreign goods; they were taken to the public offices, and tendered as payment for taxes; they were even, in some cases, gladly exchanged for the assignat itself. In these ways, specie became for the moment actually abundant; and the result was, as we have said, that paper and coin approximated to each other in value, and were for a little while almost on a par.

But this did not last. The extraordinary demands made on the government for the public service necessitated the constant issue by it of fresh paper. It had twelve hundred thousand men to arm and pay, a matériel to create, and a navy to build; and the taxes did not produce more than a fifth of the monthly expenditure. In these circumstances, their only resource was the printing of new assignats; and when, in the beginning of 1794, the sum-total of all the previous issues was doubled, the note lost its temporary value, and fell back to its former depreciated condition. This, however, might have been borne, if the decline had stopped then; but it went on, and that with accelerated speed. The greenback became more and more worthless. Those who received stated incomes, paid not in coin but in its nominal value in paper, felt themselves growing more and more straitened in their circumstances. The distress, in fact, came to be well-nigh universal, and never had the inventive mind of France a more perplexing problem submitted to it than that how the obviously approaching financial crash was to be averted.

Our readers, who remember on what a solid basis the assignat issues rested, may feel inclined to ask why that basis was not turned to more account. How did it happen that the fifteen thousand millions at which the national real property was valued, came in so slowly? The simple answer is, that purchasers could not be found, owing, no doubt, in part to the scruples and suspicions which were entertained by some as to the propriety and security of the sales; but owing chiefly, there is no question, to this-that few in these times had the means to ex

pend in such extensive investments. Still the people felt that they had wherewithal to meet their obligations, and the inquiry was often made, impatiently enough, if there was no way in which the public domains could be made available to relieve the general distress. In answer to this inquiry, various schemes were suggested. One was, to demonetize the assignats, or a portion of them; that is, to take from them the faculty of free circulation, and make them literally what they were theoretically, mere obligations upon land. But to this proposal it was well replied, that to attempt to carry out such a regulation in the case, for example, of a laboring man, was to insure his starvation. He wants bread, and you give him a piece of earth. His family are in rags, but in place of furnishing him, in return for his work, with what will procure clothes, you make him in mockery a landed proprietor. As long as there was no other circulating medium than the assignat, an expedient like this was out of the question; and the simple rumor that it was in contemplation caused a heavy fall in the price of paper.

A far more feasible scheme than this was to make a virtue of necessity, and sell the domains, not for what they were worth, but for what they would bring. They had been valued in 1790, and it was certainly putting a great temptation in the way of the moneyed public to offer them, in 1795, for three times their then estimated value in assignats; and those who had anything to spare were not slow to take advantage of the opportunity. An estate rated at ten thousand in gold, and worth, therefore, sixty thousand in paper, was offered for thirty thousand in assignats, or for half its real value. Such a bargain was not likely to present itself again. Everybody who could scrape together a bundle of notes became ambitious of attaining to the dignity of a landholder; and if the administration had gone only through with the scheme, the country would certainly have experienced a sensible relief. But after launching the scheme, and receiving many offers, the authorities became suddenly alive to its supposed extravagance, and quashed all the proceedings which had been taken in connection with it.

This straightforward plan of meeting the difficulty being abandoned, all sorts