Early in this year the Assembly issued paper to the amount of sixteen millions sterling.  What must have been the state into which the Assembly has brought your affairs, that the relief afforded by so vast a supply has been hardly perceptible?  This paper also felt an almost immediate depreciation of five per cent, which in a little time came to about seven.  The effect of these assignats on the receipt of the revenue is remarkable.  M. Necker found that the collectors of the revenue, who received in coin, paid the treasury in assignats.  The collectors made seven per cent by thus receiving in money, and accounting in depreciated paper.  It was not very difficult to foresee that this must be inevitable.  It was, however, not the less embarrassing.  M. Necker was obliged (I believe, for a considerable part, in the market of London) to buy gold and silver for the mint, which amounted to about twelve thousand pounds above the value of the commodity gained.  That minister was of opinion, that, whatever their secret nutritive virtue might be, the state could not live upon assignats alone,—­that some real silver was necessary, particularly for the satisfaction of those who, having iron in their hands, were not likely to distinguish themselves for patience, when they should perceive, that, whilst an increase of pay was held out to them in real money, it was again to be fraudulently drawn back by depreciated paper.  The minister, in this very natural distress, applied to the Assembly, that they should order the collectors to pay in specie what in specie they had received.  It could not escape him, that, if the Treasury paid three per cent for the use of a currency which should be returned seven per cent worse than the minister issued it, such a dealing could not very greatly tend to enrich the public.  The Assembly took no notice of his recommendation.  They were in this dilemma:  If they continued to receive the assignats, cash must become an alien to their Treasury; if the Treasury should refuse those paper amulets, or should discountenance them in any degree, they must destroy the credit of their sole resource.  They seem, then, to have made their option, and to have given some sort of credit to their paper by taking it themselves; at the same time, in their speeches, they made a sort of swaggering declaration, something, I rather think, above legislative competence,—­that is, that there is no difference in value between metallic money and their assignats.  This was a good, stout, proof article of faith, pronounced under an anathema by the venerable fathers of this philosophic synod. Credat who will,—­certainly not Judaeus Apella.