to this destructive table, by bringing the spirit and symbols of gaming into the minutest matters, and engaging everybody in it, and in everything, a more dreadful epidemic distemper of that kind is spread than yet has appeared in the world.  With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation.  What he receives in the morning will not have the same value at night.  What he is compelled to take as pay for an old debt will not be received as the same, when he comes to pay a debt contracted by himself; nor will it be the same, when by prompt payment he would avoid contracting any debt at all.  Industry must wither away.  Economy must be driven from your country.  Careful provision will have no existence.  Who will labor without knowing the amount of his pay?  Who will study to increase what none can estimate?  Who will accumulate, when he does not know the value of what he saves?  If you abstract it from its uses in gaming, to accumulate your paper wealth would be, not the providence of a man, but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw.

The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamesters is this,—­that, though all are forced to play, few can understand the game, and fewer still are in a condition to avail themselves of that knowledge.  The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations.  What effect it must have on the country-people is visible.  The townsman can calculate from day to day; not so the inhabitant of the country.  When the peasant first brings his corn to market, the magistrate in the towns obliges him to take the assignat at par; when he goes to the shop with this money, he finds it seven per cent the worse for crossing the way.  This market he will not readily resort to again.  The towns-people will be inflamed; they will force the country-people to bring their corn.  Resistance will begin, and the murders of Paris and St. Denis may be renewed through all France.

What signifies the empty compliment paid to the country, by giving it, perhaps, more than its share in the theory of your representation?  Where have you placed the real power over moneyed and landed circulation?  Where have you placed the means of raising and falling the value of every man’s freehold?  Those whose operations can take from or add ten per cent to the possessions of every man in France must be the masters of every man in France.  The whole of the power obtained by this Revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the moneyed directors who lead them.  The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the peasant have, none of them, habits or inclinations or experience which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France.  The very nature of a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations and all the pleasures they afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and exerting