As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to say anything of them with certainty, because they have not yet had their operation; but nobody is so sanguine as to imagine they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide gaping breach which their incapacity has made in their revenues.  At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation.  When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence, but of want, the creature not of credit, but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction.  They forget that in England not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice,—­that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited,—­and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again.  Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none.  It is powerful on ’Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent.  In payment of a debt of twenty shillings a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England.  Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority.  In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it,—­instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation,—­that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress.  Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.

Well! but a lessening of prodigal expenses, and the economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue.  In this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a financier.—­Have those who say so looked at the expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the municipalities? of the city of Paris? of the increased pay of the two armies? of the new police? of the new judicatures?  Have they even carefully compared the present pension-list with the former?  These politicians have been cruel, not economical.  Comparing the expenses of the former prodigal government and its relation to the then revenues with the expenses of this new system as opposed to the state of its new treasury, I believe the present will be found beyond all comparison more chargeable.[131]