d amounts to
206 millions in 1789[4308]. What creditors which these few figures
tell us about! As the Third-Estate, it must be noted, is the sole class
making and saving money, nearly all these creditors belong it. Thousands
of others must be added to these. In the first place, the financiers
who make advances to the government, advances that are indispensable,
because, from time immemorial, it has eaten its corn on the blade, so
the present year is always gnawing into the product of coming years;
there are 80 millions of advances in 1759, and 170 millions in 1783. In
the second place there are so many suppliers, large and small, who, on
all parts of the territory, keep accounts with the government for their
supplies and for public works, a veritable army and increasing
daily, since the government, impelled by centralization, takes sole
responsibility for all ventures, and, requested by public opinion, it
increases the number of undertakings useful to the public. Under Louis
XV. the State builds six thousand leagues of roads, and under Louis XVI.
in 1788, to guard against famine, it purchases grain to the amount of
forty millions.

Through this increase of activity and its demands for capital the State
becomes the universal debtor; henceforth public affairs are no longer
exclusively the king's business. His creditors become uneasy at his
expenditures; for it is their money he wastes, and, if he proves a bad
administrator, they will be ruined. They want to know something of his
budget, to examine his books: a lender always has the right to look
after his securities. We accordingly see the bourgeois raising his
head and beginning to pay close attention to the great machine whose
performances, hitherto concealed from vulgar eyes, have, up to the
present time, been kept a state secret. He becomes a politician, and, at
the same time, discontented. For it cannot be denied that these matters,
in which he is interested, are badly conducted. Any young man of good
family managing affairs in the same way would be checked. The expenses
of the administration of the State are always in excess of the
revenue[4309]. According to official admissions[4310] the annual deficit
amounted to 70 in 1770, and 80 millions in 1783; when one has attempted
to reduce this it has been through bankruptcies; one to the tune of two
milliards at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, and another almost equal
to it in the time of Law, and another on from a th