r's influence and experience were gradually worn away.

Mingled with the financial argument was a strong political plea. The
National Assembly had determined to confiscate the vast real property
of the French Church,--the pious accumulations of fifteen hundred
years. There were princely estates in the country, bishops' palaces and
conventual buildings in the towns; these formed between one-fourth and
one-third of the entire real property of France, and amounted in value
to at least two thousand million _livres_. By a few sweeping strokes
all this became the property of the nation. Never, apparently, did a
government secure a more solid basis for a great financial future. [5]

There were two special reasons why French statesmen desired speedily to
sell these lands. First, a financial reason,--to obtain money to
relieve the government. Secondly, a political reason,--to get this land
distributed among the thrifty middle-classes, and so commit them to the
Revolution and to the government which gave their title.

It was urged, then, that the issue of four hundred millions of paper,
(not in the shape of interest-bearing bonds, as had at first been
proposed, but in notes small as well as large), would give the treasury
something to pay out immediately, and relieve the national necessities;
that, having been put into circulation, this paper money would stimulate
business; that it would give to all capitalists, large or small, the
means for buying from the nation the ecclesiastical real estate, and
that from the proceeds of this real estate the nation would pay its
debts and also obtain new funds for new necessities: never was theory
more seductive both to financiers and statesmen.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the statesmen of France, or
the French people, were ignorant of the dangers in issuing irredeemable
paper money. No matter how skillfully the bright side of such a currency
was exhibited, all thoughtful men in France remembered its dark side.
They knew too well, from that ruinous experience, seventy years before,
in John Law's time, the difficulties and dangers of a currency not well
based and controlled. They had then learned how easy it is to issue it;
how difficult it is to check its overissue; how seductively it leads to
the absorption of the means of the workingmen and men of small fortunes;
how heavily it falls on all those living on fixed incomes, salaries or
wages; how securely it creates on the r