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Within these few days, however, the municipalities have attempted to remedy the inconvenience, by creating small paper of five, ten, fifteen, and twenty sols, which they give in exchange for assignats of five livres; but the number they are allowed to issue is limited, and the demand for them so great, that the accommodation is inadequate to the difficulty of procuring it.
It has been argued that the assignats sank in value because they were not well secured, that securing them on government real estate was as futile as if the United States had, in the financial troubles of its early days, secured notes on its real estate. This objection is utterly fallacious.
The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich, requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only to exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person taxed, and the resumption by the State of the public domain pledged to private individuals for the past three centuries.
There comes a point in the stress upon a Government when it must depart from the austerer line of financial rectitude and tamper in some way with currency. Sooner or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all the belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible paper money for their internal uses. There will be British assignats or greenbacks.
If they were sparing of their blood, they were lavish of their gold; what they failed in courage they supplied in assignats. Large promises of gain, rich offers of booty, were rife throughout the land; and wherever disaffection lurked or rebellion lingered, the enemy of England found congenial allies.
These new issues were made at last by the two great committees, with or without warrant of law, and in greater sums than ever. Complaints were made that the array of engravers and printers at the mint could not meet the demand for assignats that they could produce only from sixty to seventy millions per day and that the government was spending daily from eighty to ninety millions.
It had sold or pledged the most valuable articles of the Wardrobe, in order to meet the greatest urgencies. National property was still left; but it sold badly, and for assignats. The directory proposed a compulsory loan, which was decreed by the councils.
Assignats have fallen into a discredit beyond example, an hundred and thirty livres having been given for one Louis-d'or; and, as if this were not the natural result of circumstances like the present, a correspondence between two Englishmen informs us, that it is the work of Mr.
Only a fool would stick to them, and continue to pay the tax." "Have it your own away," said Chichikov, with assumed indifference. "As a matter of fact, I am not purchasing for profit, as you suppose, but to humour a certain whim of mine. Two and a half roubles is the most that I can offer." "Bless your heart!" retorted the host. "At least give me thirty roubles in assignats, and take the lot."
This is an instance, among many others I could produce, that our legislators have been wrong, in connecting any change of the national religion with the revolution. I am every day convinced, that this and the assignats are the great causes of the alienation visible in many who were once the warmest patriots.
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