the general and municipal establishments of all sorts,
and compared it with the regular income by revenue? Every deficiency in
these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate, before the creditor
can plant his cabbages on an acre of Church property. There is no other
prop than this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the
ground. In this situation they have purposely covered all, that they
ought industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog; and then,
blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when they push,
they drive, by the point of the bayonets, their slaves, blindfolded
indeed no worse than their lords, to take their fictions for currencies,
and to swallow down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a
dose. Then they proudly lay in their claim to a future credit, on
failure of all their past engagements, and at a time when (if in such a
matter anything can be clear) it is clear that the surplus estates will
never answer even the first of their mortgages,--I mean that of the four
hundred millions (or sixteen millions sterling) of assignats. In all
this procedure I can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing
nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud. The objections within the
Assembly to pulling up the flood-gates for this inundation of fraud are
unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by an hundred thousand
financiers in the street. These are the numbers by which the metaphysic
arithmeticians compute. These are the grand calculations on which a
philosophical public credit is founded in France. They cannot raise
supplies; but they can raise mobs. Let them rejoice in the applauses of
the club at Dundee for their wisdom and patriotism in having thus
applied the plunder of the citizens to the service of the state. I hear
of no address upon this subject from the directors of the Bank of
England,--though their approbation would be of a _little_ more weight in
the scale of credit than that of the club at Dundee. But to do justice
to the club, I believe the gentlemen who compose it to be wiser than
they appear,--that they will be less liberal of their money than of
their addresses, and that they would not give a dog's ear of their most
rumpled and ragged Scotch paper for twenty of your fairest assignats.

Early in this year the Assembly issued paper to the amount of sixteen
millions sterling. What must have been the state into which the Assembly
has brought your affairs