and eighty thousand pounds sterling, to be paid (if they choose to keep faith) by daily payments, for the interest of the first assignats.  Have they ever given themselves the trouble to state fairly the expense of the management of the Church lands in the hands of the municipalities, to whose care, skill, and diligence, and that of their legion of unknown under-agents, they have chosen to commit the charge of the forfeited estates, and the consequence of which had been so ably pointed out by the Bishop of Nancy?

But it is unnecessary to dwell on these obvious heads of incumbrance.  Have they made out any clear state of the grand incumbrance of all, I mean the whole of the general and municipal establishments of all sorts, and compared it with the regular income by revenue?  Every deficiency in these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate, before the creditor can plant his cabbages on an acre of Church property.  There is no other prop than this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the ground.  In this situation they have purposely covered all, that they ought industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog; and then, blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when they push, they drive, by the point of the bayonets, their slaves, blindfolded indeed no worse than their lords, to take their fictions for currencies, and to swallow down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a dose.  Then they proudly lay in their claim to a future credit, on failure of all their past engagements, and at a time when (if in such a matter anything can be clear) it is clear that the surplus estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages,—­I mean that of the four hundred millions (or sixteen millions sterling) of assignats.  In all this procedure I can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud.  The objections within the Assembly to pulling up the flood-gates for this inundation of fraud are unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by an hundred thousand financiers in the street.  These are the numbers by which the metaphysic arithmeticians compute.  These are the grand calculations on which a philosophical public credit is founded in France.  They cannot raise supplies; but they can raise mobs.  Let them rejoice in the applauses of the club at Dundee for their wisdom and patriotism in having thus applied the plunder of the citizens to the service of the state.  I hear of no address upon this subject from the directors of the Bank of England,—­though their approbation would be of a little more weight in the scale of credit than that of the club at Dundee.  But to do justice to the club, I believe the gentlemen who compose it to be wiser than they appear,—­that they will be less liberal of their money than of their addresses, and that they would not give a dog’s ear of their most rumpled and ragged Scotch paper for twenty of your fairest assignats.