Have they made out any clear state of the grand
encumbrance 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 floodgates for this inundation of fraud are unanswered,
but they are thoroughly refuted by a hundred thousand financiers in
the street.
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