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 monied
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 make 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?* 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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