What had the clergy to do with these transactions? What had they to do
with any public engagement further than the extent of their own debt? To
that, to be sure, their estates were bound to the last acre. Nothing can
lead more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public
confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention
to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy. The body of
confiscators, true to that moneyed interest for which they were false to
every other, have found the clergy competent to incur a legal debt. Of
course they declared them legally entitled to the property which their
power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate implied:
recognizing the rights of those persecuted citizens in the very act in
which they were thus grossly violated.
If, as I said, any persons are to mate good deficiencies to the public
creditor, besides the public at large, they must be those who managed
the agreement. Why, therefore, are not the estates of all the
comptrollers-general confiscated?[100] Why not those of the long
succession of ministers, financiers, and bankers who have been enriched
whilst the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels?
Why is not the estate of M. Laborde declared forfeited rather than of
the Archbishop of Paris, who has had nothing to do in the creation or in
the jobbing of the public funds? Or, if you must confiscate old landed
estates in favor of the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined to
one description? I do not know whether the expenses of the Duke de
Choiseul have left anything of the infinite sums which he had derived
from the bounty of his master, during the transactions of a reign which
contributed largely, by every species of prodigality in war and peace,
to the present debt of France.
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