ple under this
description in France, who never had been deprived of their allowances
by the most arbitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times, by this
assembly of the rights of men robbed without mercy. They were told, in
answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their
services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.

This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate
persons. The Assembly, with perfect consistency, it must be owned, is
engaged in a respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the
treaties made with other nations under the former government; and their
committee is to report which of them they ought to ratify, and which
not. By this means they have put the external fidelity of this virgin
state on a par with its internal.

It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal
government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of
rewarding service and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative,
than that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state, actual and
possible. The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least
allowed to the prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative
of any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies the
sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes
far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation. The
acts, however, of that dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a
boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred. Whence arose this
preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriving
its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the exertions of
monarchical authority? Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile
inconsistency; nor can partial favor be accounted for upon equitable
principles. But the contradiction and partiality which admit no
justification are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause
I do not think it difficult to discover.

By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has insensibly grown
up, and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in
that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the
mutual convertibility of land into money and of money into land, had
always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more
general and more strict than they are in England, the _jus retractus_,
the grea