you!  This is the stern problem; hopeless seemingly as squaring of the circle.  Controller Joly de Fleury, who succeeded Necker, could do nothing with it; nothing but propose loans, which were tardily filled up; impose new taxes, unproductive of money, productive of clamour and discontent.  As little could Controller d’Ormesson do, or even less; for if Joly maintained himself beyond year and day, d’Ormesson reckons only by months:  till ‘the King purchased Rambouillet without consulting him,’ which he took as a hint to withdraw.  And so, towards the end of 1783, matters threaten to come to still-stand.  Vain seems human ingenuity.  In vain has our newly-devised ‘Council of Finances’ struggled, our Intendants of Finance, Controller-General of Finances:  there are unhappily no Finances to control.  Fatal paralysis invades the social movement; clouds, of blindness or of blackness, envelop us:  are we breaking down, then, into the black horrors of national bankruptcy?

Great is Bankruptcy:  the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed.  For Nature is true and not a lie.  No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment,—­with the answer, No effects.  Pity only that it often had so long a circulation:  that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it!  Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.

Observe nevertheless how, by a just compensating law, if the lie with its burden (in this confused whirlpool of Society) sinks and is shifted ever downwards, then in return the distress of it rises ever upwards and upwards.  Whereby, after the long pining and demi-starvation of those Twenty Millions, a Duke de Coigny and his Majesty come also to have their ‘real quarrel.’  Such is the law of just Nature; bringing, though at long intervals, and were it only by Bankruptcy, matters round again to the mark.

But with a Fortunatus’ Purse in his pocket, through what length of time might not almost any Falsehood last!  Your Society, your Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement, is untrue, unjust, offensive to the eye of God and man.  Nevertheless its hearth is warm, its larder well replenished:  the innumerable Swiss of Heaven, with a kind of Natural loyalty, gather round it; will prove, by pamphleteering, musketeering, that it is a truth; or if not an unmixed (unearthly, impossible) Truth, then better, a wholesomely attempered one, (as wind is to the shorn lamb), and works well.  Changed outlook, however, when purse and larder grow empty!  Was your Arrangement so true, so accordant