My holy Hannah, with your innate and usual goodness and sense, you have done me justice by guessing exactly at the cause of my long silence.  You have been apt to tell me that my letters diverted you.  How then could I write, when it was impossible but to attrist you! when I could speak of nothing but unparalleled horrors! and but awaken your sensibility, if it slumbered for a moment!  What mind could forget the 10th of August and the 2d of September; and that the black and bloody year 1792 has plunged its murderous dagger still deeper, and already made 1793 still more detestably memorable! though its victim(844) has at last been rewarded for four years of torture by forcing from him every kind of proof of the most perfect character that ever sat on a throne.  Were these, alas! themes for letters?  Nay, am I not sure that you have been still more shocked by a crime that passes even the guilt of shedding the blood of poor Louis, to hear of atheism avowed, and the avowal tolerated by monsters calling themselves a National Assembly!  But I have no words that can reach the criminality of such inferno-human beings, but must compose a term that aims at conveying my idea of them.  For the future it will be sufficient to call them the French; I hope no other nation will ever deserve to be confounded with them!

Indeed, my dear friend, I have another reason for wishing to burn my pen entirely:  all my ideas are confounded and overturned; I do not know whether all I ever learned in the seventy first years of my seventy-five was not wrong and false:  common sense, reasoning, calculation, conjecture from analogy and from history of past events, all, all have been baffled; nor am I sure that what used to be thought the result of experience and wisdom was not a mass of mistakes.  Have I not found, do I not find, that the invention of establishing metals as the signs of property was an useless discovery, or at least only useful till the art of making paper was found out?  Nay, the latter is preferable to gold and silver. 
            If the ores were adulterated and cried down, nobody
would take them in exchange.  Depreciate paper as much as you will, and it will still serve all the purposes of barter.  Tradesmen still keep shops, stock them with goods, and deliver their commodities for those coined rags.  Poor Reason, where art thou?

To show you that memory and argument are Of no value, at least with me, I thought a year or two that this papermint would soon blow up, because I remembered that when Mr. Charles Fox and one or two more youths of brilliant genius first came to light, and into vast debts at play, they imparted to the world an important secret which they had discovered.  It was, that nobody needed to want money, if they would pay enough for it.  Accordingly, they borrowed of Jews at vast usury:  but as they had made but an incomplete calculation, the interest so soon exceeded the principal, that the system did not maintain its ground for above two or three years.  Faro has proved a more substantial speculation.  But I miscarried in applying my remembrance to the assignats, which still maintain their ground against that long-decried but as long-adored corrupter of virtue, gold.(845) Alack!  I do not hear that virtue has flourished more for the destruction of its old enemy!