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 of 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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