and faithfully follow examples.  What examples?  The examples of bankrupts.  But defeated, baffled, disgraced, when their breath, their strength, their inventions, their fancies desert them, their confidence still maintains its ground.  In the manifest failure of their abilities, they take credit for their benevolence.  When the revenue disappears in their hands, they have the presumption, in some of their late proceedings, to value themselves on the relief given to the people.  They did not relieve the people.  If they entertained such intentions, why did they order the obnoxious taxes to be paid?  The people relieved themselves, in spite of the Assembly.

But waiving all discussion on the parties who may claim the merit of this fallacious relief, has there been, in effect, any relief to the people in any form?  M. Bailly, one of the grand agents of paper circulation, lets you into the nature of this relief.  His speech to the National Assembly contained a high and labored panegyric on the inhabitants of Paris, for the constancy and unbroken resolution with which they have borne their distress and misery.  A fine picture of public felicity!  What! great courage and unconquerable firmness of mind to endure benefits and sustain redress?  One would think, from the speech of this learned lord mayor, that the Parisians, for this twelvemonth past, had been suffering the straits of some dreadful blockade,—­that Henry the Fourth had been stopping up the avenues to their supply, and Sully thundering with his ordnance at the gates of Paris,—­when in reality they are besieged by no other enemies than their own madness and folly, their own credulity and perverseness.  But M. Bailly will sooner thaw the eternal ice of his Atlantic regions than restore the central heat to Paris, whilst it remains “smitten with the cold, dry, petrific mace” of a false and unfeeling philosophy.  Some time after this speech, that is, on the thirteenth of last August, the same magistrate, giving an account of his government at the bar of the same Assembly, expresses himself as follows:—­“In the month of July, 1789,” (the period of everlasting commemoration,) “the finances of the city of Paris were yet in good order; the expenditure was counterbalanced by the receipt, and she had at that time a million [forty thousand pounds sterling] in bank.  The expenses which she has been constrained to incur, subsequent to the Revolution, amount to 2,500,000 livres.  From these expenses, and the great falling off in the product of the free gifts, not only a momentary, but a total, want of money has taken place.”  This is the Paris upon whose nourishment, in the course of the last year, such immense sums, drawn from the vitals of all France, have been expended.  As long as Paris stands in the place of ancient Rome, so long she will be maintained by the subject provinces.  It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.  As it happened in Rome, it may survive that republican domination which gave rise to it.  In that case despotism itself must submit to the vices of popularity.  Rome, under her emperors, united the evils of both systems; and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her ruin.