he more
thoughtful endeavored to breast the current.

One man there was who could have withstood the pressure: Mirabeau. He
was the popular idol,--the great orator of the Assembly and much more
than a great orator,--he had carried the nation through some of its
worst dangers by a boldness almost godlike; in the various conflicts he
had shown not only oratorical boldness, but amazing foresight. As to his
real opinion on an irredeemable currency there can be no doubt. It was
the opinion which all true statesmen have held, before his time and
since,--in his own country, in England, in America, in every modern
civilized nation. In his letter to Cerutti, written in January, 1789,
hardly six months before, he had spoken of paper money as "A nursery of
tyranny, corruption and delusion; a veritable debauch of authority in
delirium." In one of his early speeches in the National Assembly he had
called such money, when Anson covertly suggested its issue, "a loan
to an armed robber," and said of it: "that infamous word, paper money,
ought to be banished from our language." In his private letters written
at this very time, which were revealed at a later period, he showed that
he was fully aware of the dangers of inflation. But he yielded to the
pressure: partly because he thought it important to sell the government
lands rapidly to the people, and so develop speedily a large class of
small landholders pledged to stand by the government which gave them
their titles; partly, doubtless, from a love of immediate rather than
of remote applause; and, generally, in a vague hope that the severe,
inexorable laws of finance which had brought heavy punishments upon
governments emitting an irredeemable currency in other lands, at other
times, might in some way at this time, be warded off from France. [13]

The question was brought up by Montesquieu's report on the 27th
of August, 1790. This report favored, with evident reluctance, an
additional issue of paper. It went on to declare that the original issue
of four hundred millions, though opposed at the beginning, had proved
successful; that _assignats_ were economical, though they had dangers;
and, as a climax, came the declaration: "We must save the country." [14]

Upon this report Mirabeau then made one of his most powerful speeches.
He confessed that he had at first feared the issue of _assignats_, but
that he now dared urge it; that experience had shown the issue of
paper money most servi