When we follow this process in its effects, we
may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this
system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and
speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it.
By this kind of operation, that species of property becomes, as it were,
volatilized; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous activity, and thereby
throws into the hands of the several managers, principal and
subordinate, Parisian and provincial, all the representative of money,
and perhaps a full tenth part of all the land in France, which has now
acquired the worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper
circulation, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They have
reversed the Latonian kindness to the landed property of Delos. They
have sent theirs to be blown about, like the light fragments of a wreck,
_oras et littora circum_.
The new dealers, being all habitually adventurers, and without any fixed
habits or local predilections, will purchase to job out again, as the
market of paper or of money or of land shall present an advantage. For
though a holy bishop thinks that agriculture will derive great
advantages from the "_enlightened_" usurers who are to purchase the
Church confiscations, I, who am not a good, but an old farmer, with
great humility beg leave to tell his late Lordship that usury is not a
tutor of agriculture; and if the word "enlightened" be understood
according to the new dictionary, as it always is in your new schools, I
cannot conceive how a man's not believing in God can teach him to
cultivate the earth with the least of any additional skill or
encouragement.
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