pace.  And of this sort, judging by the past attempts, is Paper Money.  All the ingenuity and efforts of the most skillful trainers of the Old World, and of the most cunning jockeys of the New, have been tasked in vain to devise an effective discipline and curb for this impatient colt.  Paper Money either refuses to be ridden, and runs rampant away, or, if any one succeed in mounting him for a time, he performs a journey like that which Don Quixote took on the back of the famous Cavalino, or Winged Horse.  In imagination he ascended to the enchanted regions,—­but in reality he was only dragged through alternate gusts of fire and of cold winds, to find the horse himself, in the end, a mere depository of squibs and crackers.

Paper money has been issued, for the most part, on the one or the other of two conditions, namely:  as irredeemable, when it has been made to rest on the vague obligation of some government to pay it some time or other in property; or as convertible into gold and silver on demand.  But under both conditions it seems to have been impossible to preserve it from excess and consequent depreciation.  Nothing would appear to be safer and sounder, on the face of it, than a money-obligation backed by all the responsibility and property of a government; and yet we do not recall a single instance in which an irredeemable government-money has been issued, where it did not sooner or later swamp the government beyond all hope of its redemption.  No virtue of statesmanship is proof against the temptation of creating money at will.  Even where there has been a nominal convertibility on demand of the bills of government banks, they have worked badly in practice.  In 1637, for instance, the monarch of Sweden established the Bank of Stockholm; yet in a little while its issues amounted to forty-eight millions of roubles, and their depreciation to ninety-six per cent.  In 1736, Denmark created the Bank of Copenhagen; but within nine years from its foundation it suspended redemptions altogether, and its notes were depreciated forty-six per cent.  We need not refer to the extraordinary issues of French assignats, or of American continental money,—­nor to the deluges of paper which have fallen upon Russia and Austria.  During all these experiments, the sufferings of the people, according to the different historians, were absolutely appalling.  One of these experiments of paper money, however, begun under the most promising auspices, and on a professed basis of convertibility, was yet so stupendous and awful in its effects, that it has taken its place as a Pharos in History, and is never to be forgotten.  We refer, of course, to the banking prodigalities of the Regency of France, undertaken in connection with the scheme known as Law’s Mississippi Bubble,—­although the Bank and the Bubble were not essentially connected.  We presume that our readers are acquainted with the incidents, because all the modern historians have described them, and because the more philosophical impute to