_ would,
a month later, have a purchasing power of ninety or eighty or sixty
_livres_. The result was that capitalists feared to embark their means
in business. Enterprise received a mortal blow. Demand for labor was
still further diminished; and here came a new cause of calamity: for
this uncertainty withered all far-reaching undertakings. The business
of France dwindled into a mere living from hand to mouth. This state of
things, too, while it bore heavily upon the moneyed classes, was
still more ruinous to those in moderate and, most of all, to those in
straitened circumstances. With the masses of the people, the purchase of
every article of supply became a speculation--a speculation in which
the professional speculator had an immense advantage over the ordinary
buyer. Says the most brilliant of apologists for French revolutionary
statesmanship, "Commerce was dead; betting took its place." [33]

Nor was there any compensating advantage to the mercantile classes. The
merchant was forced to add to his ordinary profit a sum sufficient to
cover probable or possible fluctuations in value, and while prices of
products thus went higher, the wages of labor, owing to the number of
workmen who were thrown out of employment, went lower.

But these evils, though great, were small compared to those far more
deep-seated signs of disease which now showed themselves throughout the
country. One of these was the _obliteration of thrift_ from the minds
of the French people. The French are naturally thrifty; but, with such
masses of money and with such uncertainty as to its future value, the
ordinary motives for saving and care diminished, And a loose luxury
spread throughout the country. A still worse outgrowth was the increase
of speculation and gambling. With the plethora of paper currency in
1791 appeared the first evidences of that cancerous disease which
always follows large issues of irredeemable currency,--a disease more
permanently injurious to a nation than war, pestilence or famine. For
at the great metropolitan centers grew a luxurious, speculative,
stock-gambling body, which, like a malignant tumor, absorbed into itself
the strength of the nation and sent out its cancerous fibres to the
remotest hamlets. At these city centers abundant wealth seemed to be
piled up: in the country at, large there grew a dislike of steady labor
and a contempt for moderate gains and simple living. In a pamphlet
published in May, 1791, we see h