thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a false claimant to his goods. When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason, on which you have set your image and superscription, you cry it down as base money, and tell them you will pay for the future with French guards, and dragoons, and hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand authority of a king, who is only the instrument of destroying, without any power of protecting either the people or his own person. Through him it seems you will make yourselves obeyed. They answer, You have taught us that there are no gentlemen; and which of your principles teach us to bow to kings whom we have not elected? We know, without your teaching, that lands were given for the support of feudal dignities, feudal titles, and feudal offices. When you took down the cause as a grievance, why should the more grievous effect remain? As there are now no hereditary honours, and no distinguished families, why are we taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have sent down our old aristocratic landlords in no other character, and with no other title, but that of exactors under your authority. Have you endeavoured to make these your rent-gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us with their arms reversed, their shields broken, their impresses defaced; and so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such un- feathered two-legged things, that we no longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do not even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physi- cally they may be the same men; though we arc not quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doc- trine of personal identity. In all other respects they are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents, as you have to ahrogate all their honours, titles, and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to do; and it is one instance, among many indeed, of your assumption of undelegated power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their chilis, theil mobs, and their national guards, directing yon at their pleasure, and giving that as law to you, which, under your authority, is transmitted as law to us. Through you, these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all. Why should not you attend as much to the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers, relative to distinctions and titles of honour, by which neither they nor we are affected at all? But we rind you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessi- ties. Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals'? Before this measure of yours, we might have thought we were not perfectly equal We might have entertained some old, habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favour of those landlord- hut we cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to them, you could have made the law that degrades them. You ha\. forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect, and now you send troops td sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to feai REVOLUTION IN' FRANCE. 309 and force, which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion.
The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all rational ears; hut to the politicians of metaphysics who have opened schools for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid and conclusive. It is obvious, that on a mere consideration of the right, the leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled to abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns. It would be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings, and to complete the analogy of their conduct. But they had newly possessed them- selves of a great body of landed property by confis- cation. They had this commodity at market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves. The only security which property enjoys in any one of its descriptions, is from the interests of their rapacity with regard to some other. They have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is' to be pro- tected and what subverted.
Neither have they left any principle by which any of their municipalities can be bound to obedience; or even conscientiously obliged not to separate from the whole, to become independent, or to connect itself with some other state. The people of Lyons, it seems, have refused lately to pay taxes. Why should they not? What lawful authority is there left to exact them? The king imposed some of them. The old states, methodised by orders, settled 310 i noNs n\ tiif.
tlic more ancient. They may Baj to the Assembly, Who are you, that arc not our kings, nor the st a,-- we have elected, nor sit on the principl » on which we have elected youJ And who are we, that when we see the gahelles which you have ordered to he paid, wholly shaken off, when we Bee the act of dl8> obedience afterwards ratified iiy yourselves— whft are we, that we arc not to judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay. and arc not to avail our- selves of the same [towers, the validity of which you have approved in Others' V To this the answer is, We will send troops. The last reason of kings is always the first with your Assemhly. This military aid may serve for a time, whilst the impression of the increase of pay remains, and the vanity of being umpires in all disputes is Battered. But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the hand that employ! it. The Assemhlyr keep a school where, systemati- cally, and with unremitting perseverance, they teach principles, and form regulations, destructive to all spirit of subordination, civil and military — and then they expect that they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by an anarchic army.
The municipal army, which, according to their new policy, is to balance this national army, if con- sidered in itself only, is of a constitution much more simple, and in every respect less exceptionable. It is a mere democratic body, unconnected with the crown or the kingdom; armed, and trained, and officered at the pleasure of the districts to winch the corps severally belong: and the personal service of the individuals, who compose, or the fine in lieu of personal service, are directed h\ the same ail- REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 311 thority.* Nothing is more uniform. If, however, considered in any relation to the crown, to the National Assembly, to the public tribunals, or to the other army, or considered in a view to any coherence or connexion between its parts, it seems a monster, and can hardly fail to terminate its per- plexed movements in some great national calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general constitution, than the systasis of Crete, or the confederation of Poland, or any other ill-devised corrective which has yet been imagined, in the necessities produced by an ill-constructed system of government.
Having concluded my few remarks on the con- stitution of the supreme power, the executive, the judicature, the military, and on the reciprocal re- lation of all these establishments, I shall say some- thing of the ability showed by your legislators with regard to the revenue.
In their proceedings relative to this object, if pos- sible, still fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. When the states met, it seemed to be the great object to improve the system of revenue, to enlarge its collection, to cleanse it of oppression and vexation, and to establish it on the most solid footing. Great were the expectations entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was by this grand arrangement that France was to * I see by M. Necker's account, that the national guards of Paris have received, over and above the money levied within their own city, about £145,000 sterling out of the public treasure. Whether this be an actual payment for the nine months of their existence, or an estimate of their yearly charge, I do not clearly perceive. It is of no great importance, as certainly they may take whatever they please.
312 RBFLl I riONS ON i HE stand or lull; and this became, in my opinion very properly, the test by which the skill and patriotism of those who ruled in that assembly would be tried. The revenue of the State is the state. In effect all depends upon it, whether tor support or for refor- mation. The dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon the quantity and the kind of virtue that may lie exerted in it. As all great qualities "t the mind which operate in public, and are not merely suffering and passive, require force for their display, I had almost said for their unequivocal existence, the revenue, which is the spring of all power, he- comes in it- administration the sphere of every active virtue. Puhlic virtue, being of a nature mag- nificent and splendid, instituted for great t and conversant about great concerns, requires abun- dant scope and room, and cannot spread am! under confinement, and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid. Through the revenue alone the body politic can act in its true genius and character, and therefore it will display just as much of its cok lective virtue, and as much of that virtue which may characterise those who move it, and are. as it were, its life and guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just revenue. For from hence, not only magnani- mity, and liberality, and beneficence, and fortitude, and providence, and the tutelary protection of all good arts, derive their food, and the growth of their organs, hut continence, and self-denial, and labour, and vigilance, and frugality, and whatever else there is in which the mind shews itself above the appetite, are no where more in their proper element than in the provision and distribution of the public wealth.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 313 It is therefore not without reason that the science of speculative and practical finance, which must take to its aid so many auxiliary branches of knowledge, stands high in the estimation not only of the ordinary sort, but of the wisest and best men; and as this science has grown with the progress of its object, the prosperity and improvement of nations has gene- rally increased with the increase of their revenues; and they will both continue to grow and flourish, as long as the balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals, and what is collected for the common efforts of the state, bear to each other a due reciprocal proportion, and are kept in a close correspondence and communication. And perhaps it may be owing to the greatness of revenues, and to the urgency of state necessities, that old abuses in the constitution of finances are discovered, and their true nature and rational theory comes to be more perfectly understood; insomuch, that a smaller revenue might have been more dis- tressing in one period than a far greater is found to be in another; the proportionate wealth even re- maining the same. In this state of things, the French Assembly found something in their revenues to preserve, to secure, and wisely to administer, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud assumption might justify the severest tests, yet in trying their abilities on their financial proceedings, I would only consider what is the plain, obvious duty of a common finance minister, and try them upon that, and not upon models of ideal perfection.
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and .'514 III) LECTIONS iK.ill' equalitj. t" employ it economically; and when necessity obliges him to make use of credit. I .■ure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of Ids proceedings, tin- exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. On these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of those in the National Assembly, who have taken to them- selves the management of this arduous concern. Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by a report of- M. Vernier, from the com- mittee of finances, of the 2nd of August last, that the amount of the national revenue, as com- pared with its produce before the Revolution. diminished by the sum of two hundred DuHioi eight millions sterling of the annual income, con- siderably more than one-third of the whole!
If this be the result of great ability, never surely was ability displayed in a more distinguished man- ner, or with so powerful an effect. No common folly, no vulgar incapacity, no ordinary, official neg- ligence, even no official crime, no corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility which we have seen in the modern world, could in s() ghort a time have made so complete an overthrow of the finances, and with them, of the strength of a great kingdom. — Cedo (/ui veatrum rempubticcm tantam an /mil riti) f The sophisters and declaimers, as -nun as the Assembly met, began witli decrying the ancient constitution of the revenue in many of it- mosl essential branches, such as the public monopoly of salt. They charged it. as truly as unwisely, with REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 315 being ill-contrived, oppressive, and partial. This representation they were not satisfied to make use of in speeches preliminary to some plan of reform; they declared it in a solemn resolution or public- sentence, as it were judicially, passed upon it; and this they dispersed throughout the nation. At the time they passed, the decree, with the same gravity they ordered the same absurd, oppressive, and partial tax to be paid, until they could find a re- venue to replace it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly, some of whom were charged with other contributions, perhaps equiva- lent, were totally disinclined to bear any part of the burden, which by an equal distribution was to redeem the others. As to the Assembly, occupied as it was with the declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with their arrangements for gene- ral confusion, it had neither leisure nor capacity to contrive, nor authority to enforce any plan of any kind relative to the replacing the tax or equalizing it, or compensating the provinces, or for conducting their minds to any scheme of accommodation with the other districts which were to be relieved.
The people of the salt provinces, impatient under taxes damned by the authority which had directed their payment, very soon found their patience ex- hausted. They thought themselves as skilful in demolishing as the Assembly could be. They re- lieved themselves by throwing off the whole burden. Animated by this example, each district, or part of a district, judging of its own grievance by its own 816 BEFLECTIONS ON THB feeling, and of its remedy by its own opinion, did as it pleased with other taxes.
We are next to see how they have conducted themselves in contriving equal impositions, propor- tioned to the means of the citizens, and the least likely to lean heavy on the active capital employed in the generation of that private wealth, from whence the public fortune must be derived. By Buffering the several districts, and several of the individuals in each district, to judge of what part of the old revenue they might withhold, instead of better prin- ciples of equality, a new inequality was introduced of the most oppressive kind. Payments were regu- lated by dispositions. The part'- of the kingdom which were the most submissive, the most orderly, or the most affectionate to the commonwealth, bore the whole burden of the state. Nothing turn- out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble govern- ment. To till up all the deficiencies in the old im- positions, and the new deficiencies of every kind which were to be expected, what remained to B statt without authority? The National Assembly called for a voluntary benevolence; for a fourth pari at the income of all the citizens, to be estimated on the honour of those who were to pay. They obtained something more than could be rationally calculated, but what was far indeed from answerable to their real necessities, and much less to their fond expec- tations. Rational people could have hoped for little from this their tax in the disguise of a benevolence j a tax weak, ineffective, and unequal; a tax by which luxury, avarice, and selfishness were screened, and the load thrown upon productive capital, upon REVOLUTION IN FHANCL. 317 integrity, generosity, and public spirit — a tax of regulation upon virtue. At length the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying means (with little success) of exacting their benevolence by force. This benevolence, the ricketty offspring of weak- ness, was to be supported by another resource, the twin brother of the same prolific imbecility. The patriotic donations were to make good the failure of the patriotic contribution. John Doe was to be- come security for Richard Roe. By this scheme they took things of much price from the giver, com- paratively of small value to the receiver; they ruined several trades; they pillaged the crown of its orna- ments, the churches of their plate, and the people of their personal decorations. The invention of these juvenile pretenders to liberty, was in reality nothing more than a servile imitation of one of the poorest resources of doting despotism. They took an old huge full-bottomed perriwig out of the wardrobe of the antiquated frippery of Louis the Fourteenth to cover the premature baldness of the National Assembly. They produced this old- fashioned formal folly, though it had been so abun- dantly exposed in the Memoirs of the Duke de St. Simon, if to reasonable men it had wanted any arguments to display its mischief and insufficiency.
A device of the same kind was tried in my memory by Louis the Fifteenth, but it answered at no time. However, the necessities of ruinous wars were some excuse for desperate projects. The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise. But here was a season for disposition and providence. It was in a time of profound peace, then enjoyed for five years, and .118 lvl ii.ii j IONS OK l III promising a much longer continuance, that they had recourse to this desperate trifling. They were sure to lose more reputation by sporting, in their serious situation, with these toys and playthings of finance, which have filled half their journals, than could possibly be compensated by the pom- temporary supply which they afforded. It seemed as it those who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circumstances, or wholly unequal to their necessities. Whatever virtue may be in these devices, it is obvious that neither the patriotic gifts, nor the patriotic contribution, can ever be resorted to again. The resources of public folly are - i exhausted. The whole indeed of their scheme oi revenue is to make, by any artifice, an appear- ance of a full reservoir for the hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the Bprings and living foun- tains of perennial supply. The account not long since furnished by M. Xecker was meant, without question, to be favourable. He gives a flattering view of the means of getting through the year; but he expresses, as it is natural he should, some ap- prehension for that which was to succeed. ():i this last prognostic, instead of entering into the grounds of this apprehension, in order, by a proper foresight, to prevent the prognosticated evil, M. Necker receives a sort of triendh reprimand from the president of the Assembly.
As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossi- ble to say any thing of them with certainty. becaUM they have not yet had their operation; but nobody i- so sanguine as to imagine they will fill up any perceptible pari of the wide gaping breach which REVOLUTION IN FRAM1 ->19 their incapacity has made in their revenues. At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourish- ing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper-money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on Change, because in Westminster-hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings, a creditor may refuse all the paper of the bank of England. Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of. any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. In fact it might be easily shewn, that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scar- city of cash, and an exuberance of paper, a subject of complaint in this nation.
Well! but a lessening of prodigal expenses, and the economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient Assembly, make amends En the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue.
In this at least the} have fulfilled the duty of ■ financier. Have those who say so looked at the expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the municipalities? of the city of Paris? ofthe increased pay of the two armies? of the new police? ofthe new judicatures? Have they even carefully compared the present pension-list with the former? These politicians have been cruel, not economical. Cora-, paring the expenses of the former prodigal govern- ment and its relation to the then revenues with the expenses of this new system as oppposed to the state of its new treasury, I believe the pre- sent will be found beyond all comparison more chargeable.* It remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability, furnished by the present French managers when they are to raise supplies on credit. Here I am a little at a stand; for credit, properly speak- ing, they have none. The credit of the ancient • The reader will observe, that I have hut lightly touched (my plan demanded nothing more) on the condition ofthe French finance*, as connected with the demands upon them. If 1 had intended to do otherwise, the materials in my hands for such a task are not altogether perfect. On this subject. 1 refer the reader to M. de Calonne's work: and the tremendous display thai he has made of the havoc and devastation in the public estate, and in all the affairs of France, caused by the presumptuous, good intentions of ignorance and incapacity. Such effects tlm^i- causes will always ■ iint with a pretty strict eye. and.
with perhaps too much rigour, deducting every thing which maybe placed to the account <>i a financier out of place, "ho might lie supposed bj his enemies dasirous of making the most of his I believe it «:M be found, that the daring spirit of innovators, than what has!■■ it the: r was it an\ time furni mankind.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 321 government was not indeed the best; but they could always, on some terms, command money, not only at home, but from most of the countries of Europe where a surplus capital was accumulated; and the credit of that government was improving daily. The establishment of a system of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new strength; and so it would actually' have done, if a system of liberty had been established. What offers has their govern- ment of pretended liberty had from Holland, from Hamburgh, from Switzerland, from Genoa, from England, for a dealing in their paper? Why should these nations of commerce and economy enter into any pecuniary dealings with a people who attempt to reverse the very nature of things; amongst whom they see the debtor prescribing, at the point of the bayonet, the medium of his solvency to the creditor; discharging one of his engagements with another; turning his very penury into his resource; and paying his interest with his rags?