[Sidenote:  Objection to the stability of the French system.]

There are other views of things which may be used to give us a perfect (though in my opinion a delusive) assurance of our own security.  The first of these is from the weakness and rickety nature of the new system in the place of its first formation.  It is thought that the monster of a commonwealth cannot possibly live,—­that at any rate the ill contrivance of their fabric will make it fall in pieces of itself,—­that the Assembly must be bankrupt,—­and that this bankruptcy will totally destroy that system from the contagion of which apprehensions are entertained.

For my part I have long thought that one great cause of the stability of this wretched scheme of things in France was an opinion that it could not stand, and therefore that all external measures to destroy it were wholly useless.

[Sidenote:  Bankruptcy.]

As to the bankruptcy, that event has happened long ago, as much as it is ever likely to happen.  As soon as a nation compels a creditor to take paper currency in discharge of his debt, there is a bankruptcy.  The compulsory paper has in some degree answered,—­not because there was a surplus from Church lands, but because faith has not been kept with the clergy.  As to the holders of the old funds, to them the payments will be dilatory, but they will be made; and whatever may be the discount on paper, whilst paper is taken, paper will be issued.

[Sidenote:  Resources.]

As to the rest, they have shot out three branches of revenue to supply all those which they have destroyed:  that is, the Universal Register of all Transactions, the heavy and universal Stamp Duty, and the new Territorial Impost, levied chiefly on the reduced estates of the gentlemen.  These branches of the revenue, especially as they take assignats in payment, answer their purpose in a considerable degree, and keep up the credit of their paper:  for, as they receive it in their treasury, it is in reality funded upon all their taxes and future resources of all kinds, as well as upon the Church estates.  As this paper is become in a manner the only visible maintenance of the whole people, the dread of a bankruptcy is more apparently connected with the delay of a counter-revolution than with the duration of this republic; because the interest of the new republic manifestly leans upon it, and, in my opinion, the counter-revolution cannot exist along with it.  The above three projects ruined some ministers under the old government, merely for having conceived them.  They are the salvation of the present rulers.

As the Assembly has laid a most unsparing and cruel hand on all men who have lived by the bounty, the justice, or the abuses of the old government, they have lessened many expenses.  The royal establishment, though excessively and ridiculously great for their scheme of things, is reduced at least one half; the estates of the king’s brothers, which under the ancient government had been in truth royal revenues, go to the general stock of the confiscation; and as to the crown lands, though under the monarchy they never yielded two hundred and fifty thousand a year, by many they are thought at least worth three times as much.