With you a man can neither earn nor
buy his dinner without a speculation. What he receives in the morning
will not have the same value at night. What he is compelled to take as
pay for an old debt will not be received as the same, when he comes to
pay a debt contracted by himself; nor will it be the same, when by
prompt payment he would avoid contracting any debt at all. Industry must
wither away. Economy must be driven from your country. Careful provision
will have no existence. Who will labor without knowing the amount of his
pay? Who will study to increase what none can estimate? Who will
accumulate, when he does not know the value of what he saves? If you
abstract it from its uses in gaming, to accumulate your paper wealth
would be, not the providence of a man, but the distempered instinct of a
jackdaw.
The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a
nation of gamesters is this,--that, though all are forced to play, few
can understand the game, and fewer still are in a condition to avail
themselves of that knowledge. The many must be the dupes of the few who
conduct the machine of these speculations. What effect it must have on
the country-people is visible. The townsman can calculate from day to
day; not so the inhabitant of the country. When the peasant first brings
his corn to market, the magistrate in the towns obliges him to take the
assignat at par; when he goes to the shop with this money, he finds it
seven per cent the worse for crossing the way.
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