Have they made out any clear state of the grand incumbrance of all, I
mean the whole of the general and municipal establishments of all sorts,
and compared it with the regular income by revenue? Every deficiency in
these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate, before the creditor
can plant his cabbages on an acre of Church property. There is no other
prop than this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the
ground. In this situation they have purposely covered all, that they
ought industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog; and then,
blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when they push,
they drive, by the point of the bayonets, their slaves, blindfolded
indeed no worse than their lords, to take their fictions for currencies,
and to swallow down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a
dose. Then they proudly lay in their claim to a future credit, on
failure of all their past engagements, and at a time when (if in such a
matter anything can be clear) it is clear that the surplus estates will
never answer even the first of their mortgages,--I mean that of the four
hundred millions (or sixteen millions sterling) of assignats. In all
this procedure I can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing
nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud. The objections within the
Assembly to pulling up the flood-gates for this inundation of fraud are
unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by an hundred thousand
financiers in the street.
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