But the contradiction and partiality which admit no
justification are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause
I do not think it difficult to discover.
By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has insensibly grown
up, and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in
that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the
mutual convertibility of land into money and of money into land, had
always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more
general and more strict than they are in England, the _jus retractus_,
the great mass of landed property held by the crown, and, by a maxim of
the French law, held unalienably, the vast estates of the ecclesiastic
corporations,--all these had kept the landed and moneyed interests more
separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct
species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in
this country.
The moneyed property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the
people. They saw it connected with their distresses, and aggravating
them. It was no less envied by the old landed interests,--partly for the
same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so
as it eclipsed, by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed
pedigrees and naked titles of several among the nobility.
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