f the error is
on their side, no harm can result, as you yourself say, beyond the
failure of a hope. The measure, excellent in their opinion, in yours is
negative. Let it be tried, then, since the worst which can happen is not
the realization of an evil, but the non-realization of a benefit.

F. In the first place, the failure of a hope is a very great
misfortune to any people. It is also very undesirable that the
Government should announce the re-imposition of several taxes on the
faith of a resource which must infallibly fail. Nevertheless, your
remark would deserve some consideration, if, after the issue of paper
money and its depreciation, the equilibrium of values should instantly
and simultaneously take place, in all things and in every part of the
country. The measure would tend, as in my example of the players, to a
universal mystification, upon which the best thing we could do would be
to look at one another and laugh. But this is not in the course of
events. The experiment has been made, and every time a despot has
altered the money ...

B. Who says anything about altering the money?

F. Why, to force people to take in payment scraps of paper which have
been officially baptized _francs_, or to force them to receive, as
weighing five grains, a piece of silver which weighs only two and a
half, but which has been officially named a _franc_, is the same thing,
if not worse; and all the reasoning which can be made in favour of
assignats has been made in favour of legal false money. Certainly,
looking at it, as you did just now, and as you appear to be doing still,
if it is believed that to multiply the instruments of exchange is to
multiply the exchanges themselves as well as the things exchanged, it
might very reasonably be thought that the most simple means was to
double the crowns, and to cause the law to give to the half the name and
value of the whole. Well, in both cases, depreciation is inevitable. I
think I have told you the cause. I must also inform you, that this
depreciation, which, with paper, might go on till it came to nothing, is
effected by continually making dupes; and of these, poor people, simple
persons, workmen and countrymen are the chief.

B. I see; but stop a little. This dose of Economy is rather too strong
for once.

F. Be it so. We are agreed, then, upon this point,--that wealth is the
mass of useful things Which we produce by labour; or, still better, the
result of all the efforts