ing millions of copper tokens, by lowering the promised
rate of interest on Government loans, by formally repudiating both
interest and principal, had been tried, both in this and the preceding
reign, with the usual success. An inconvertible paper currency,
stimulating industry and improving morals by converting beneficent
commerce into baleful gambling--that fatal invention did not then exist.
Meantime, the legitimate trader and innocent citizen were harassed, and
the general public endangered, as much as the limited machinery of the
epoch permitted.

The available, unpledged revenue of the kingdom hardly amounted to five
millions of dollars a-year. The regular annual income of the church was
at least six millions. The whole personal property of the nation was
estimated in a very clumsy and unsatisfactory way, no doubt--at sixty
millions of dollars. Thus the income of the priesthood was ten per cent.
of the whole funded estate of the country, and at least a million a year
more than the income of the Government. Could a more biting epigram be
made upon the condition to which the nation had been reduced?

Labour was more degraded than ever. The industrious classes, if such
could be said to exist, were esteemed every day more and more infamous.
Merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, were reptiles, as vilely, esteemed as
Jews, Moors, Protestants, or Pagans. Acquiring wealth by any kind of
production was dishonourable. A grandee who should permit himself to sell
the wool from his boundless sheep-walks disgraced his caste, and was
accounted as low as a merchant. To create was the business of slaves and
miscreants: to destroy was the distinguishing attribute of Christians and
nobles. To cheat, to pick, and to steal, on the most minute and the most
gigantic scale--these were also among the dearest privileges of the
exalted classes. No merchandize was polluting save the produce of honest
industry. To sell places in church and state, the army, the navy, and the
sacred tribunals of law, to take bribes from rich and poor, high and low;
in sums infinitesimal or enormous, to pillage the exchequer in, every
imaginable form, to dispose of titles of honour, orders of chivalry,
posts in municipal council, at auction; to barter influence, audiences,
official interviews against money cynically paid down in rascal
counters--all this was esteemed consistent with patrician dignity.

The ministers, ecclesiastics, and those about court, obtaining