A noble indignation rises in the minds of your popular leaders, on hearing the magic-lantern in their show of finance compared to the fraudulent exhibitions of Mr. Law.  They cannot bear to hear the sands of his Mississippi compared with the rock of the Church, on which they build their system.  Pray let them suppress this glorious spirit, until they show to the world what piece of solid ground there is for their assignats, which they have not preoccupied by other charges.  They do injustice to that great mother fraud, to compare it with their degenerate imitation.  It is not true that Law built solely on a speculation concerning the Mississippi.  He added the East India trade; he added the African trade; he added the farms of all the farmed revenue of France.  All these together unquestionably could not support the structure which the public enthusiasm, not he, chose to build upon these bases.  But these were, however, in comparison, generous delusions.  They supposed, and they aimed at, an increase of the commerce of France.  They opened to it the whole range of the two hemispheres.  They did not think of feeding France from its own substance.  A grand imagination found in this flight of commerce something to captivate.  It was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle.  It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours is.  Men were not then quite shrunk from their natural dimensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy, and fitted for low and vulgar deceptions.  Above all, remember, that, in imposing on the imagination, the then managers of the system made a compliment to the freedom of men.  In their fraud there was no mixture of force.  This was reserved to our time, to quench the little glimmerings of reason which might break in upon the solid darkness of this enlightened age.

On recollection, I have said nothing of a scheme of finance which may be urged in favor of the abilities of these gentlemen, and which has been introduced with great pomp, though not yet finally adopted in the National Assembly.  It comes with something solid in aid of the credit of the paper circulation; and much has been said of its utility and its elegance.  I mean the project for coining into money the bells of the suppressed churches.  This is their alchemy.  There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.

It is as little worth remarking any farther upon all their drawing and re-drawing, on their circulation for putting off the evil day, on the play between the Treasury and the Caisse d’Escompte, and on all these old, exploded contrivances of mercantile fraud, now exalted into policy of state.  The revenue will not be trifled with.  The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.  Here, then, the metaphysicians descend from their airy speculations,