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 monied interest had
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 ecclesiastical corporations-
all these had kept the landed and monied 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 monied 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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