lour advanced from two
_francs_ in 1790, to 225 _francs_ in 1795; a pair of shoes, from
five _francs_ to 200; a hat, from 14 _francs_ to 500; butter, to,
560 _francs_ a pound; a turkey, to 900 _francs_. [66] Everything
was enormously inflated in price _except the wages of labor_. As
manufacturers had closed, wages had fallen, until all that kept them up
seemed to be the fact that so many laborers were drafted off into the
army. From this state of things came grievous wrong and gross fraud.
Men who had foreseen these results and had gone into debt were of course
jubilant. He who in 1790 had borrowed 10,000 _francs_ could pay his
debts in 1796 for about 35 _francs_. Laws were made to meet these
abuses. As far back as 1794 a plan was devised for publishing official
"tables of depreciation" to be used in making equitable settlements of
debts, but all such machinery proved futile. On the 18th of May, 1796, a
young man complained to the National Convention that his elder brother,
who had been acting as administrator of his deceased father's estate,
had paid the heirs in _assignats_, and that he had received scarcely one
three-hundredth part of the real value of his share. [67] To meet cases
like this, a law was passed establishing a "scale of proportion." Taking
as a standard the value of the _assignat_ when there were two billions
in circulation, this law declared that, in payment of debts, one-quarter
should be added to the amount originally borrowed for every five hundred
millions added to the circulation. In obedience to this law a man
who borrowed two thousand _francs_ when there were two billions in
circulation would have to pay his creditors twenty-five hundred
_francs_ when half a billion more were added to the currency, and over
thirty-five thousand _francs_ before the emissions of paper reached
their final amount. This brought new evils, worse, if possible, than the
old. [68]

The question will naturally be asked, _On whom did this vast
depreciation mainly fall at last_? When this currency had sunk to
about one three-hundredth part of its nominal value and, after that,
to nothing, in whose hands was the bulk of it? The answer is simple. I
shall give it in the exact words of that thoughtful historian from whom
I have already quoted: "Before the end of the year 1795 the paper money
was almost exclusively in the hands of the working classes, employees
and men of small means, whose property was not large enough to inves