from the weakness and rickety nature of the new system
in the place of its first formation. It is thought that the monster of a
commonwealth cannot possibly live,--that at any rate the ill contrivance
of their fabric will make it fall in pieces of itself,--that the
Assembly must be bankrupt,--and that this bankruptcy will totally
destroy that system from the contagion of which apprehensions are
entertained.

For my part I have long thought that one great cause of the stability of
this wretched scheme of things in France was an opinion that it could
not stand, and therefore that all external measures to destroy it were
wholly useless.

[Sidenote: Bankruptcy.]

As to the bankruptcy, that event has happened long ago, as much as it is
ever likely to happen. As soon as a nation compels a creditor to take
paper currency in discharge of his debt, there is a bankruptcy. The
compulsory paper has in some degree answered,--not because there was a
surplus from Church lands, but because faith has not been kept with the
clergy. As to the holders of the old funds, to them the payments will be
dilatory, but they will be made; and whatever may be the discount on
paper, whilst paper is taken, paper will be issued.

[Sidenote: Resources.]

As to the rest, they have shot out three branches of revenue to supply
all those which they have destroyed: that is, _the Universal Register of
all Transactions_, the heavy and universal _Stamp Duty_, and the new
_Territorial Impost_, levied chiefly on the reduced estates of the
gentlemen. These branches of the revenue, especially as they take
assignats in payment, answer their purpose in a considerable degree, and
keep up the credit of their paper: for, as they receive it in their
treasury, it is in reality funded upon all their taxes and future
resources of all kinds, as well as upon the Church estates. As this
paper is become in a manner the only visible maintenance of the whole
people, the dread of a bankruptcy is more apparently connected with the
delay of a counter-revolution than with the duration of this republic;
because the interest of the new republic manifestly leans upon it, and,
in my opinion, the counter-revolution cannot exist along with it. The
above three projects ruined some ministers under the old government,
merely for having conceived them. They are the salvation of the present
rulers.

As the Assembly has laid a most unsparing and cruel hand on all men who
have lived by t