_assignats_, or of American continental money,--nor to the deluges
of paper which have fallen upon Russia and Austria. During all these
experiments, the sufferings of the people, according to the different
historians, were absolutely appalling. One of these experiments of
paper money, however, begun under the most promising auspices, and on a
professed basis of convertibility, was yet so stupendous and awful in
its effects, that it has taken its place as a Pharos in History, and is
never to be forgotten. We refer, of course, to the banking prodigalities
of the Regency of France, undertaken in connection with the scheme known
as Law's Mississippi Bubble,--although the Bank and the Bubble were not
essentially connected. We presume that our readers are acquainted with
the incidents, because all the modern historians have described them,
and because the more philosophical impute to them an active agency in
the origination of that moral corruption and lack of political principle
which hastened the advent of the great Revolution. Louis XIV. having
left behind him, as the price of his glory, a debt of about a thousand
millions of dollars, the French ministry, with a view to reduce it,
ordered a re-coinage of the louis-d'or. An edict was promulgated,
calling in the coin at sixteen livres, to be issued again at twenty; but
Law, an acute and enterprising Scotchman, suggested that the end might
be more happily accomplished by a project for a bank, which he carried
in his pocket. He proposed to buy up the old coin at a higher rate than
the mint allowed, and to pay for it in bank-notes. This project was so
successful that the Regent took it into his own hands, and then began
an issue of bills which literally intoxicated the whole of France.
No scenes of stock-jobbing, of gambling, of frenzied speculation, of
reckless excitement and licentiousness ever surpassed the scenes daily
enacted in the Rue Quincampoix; and when the bubble burst, the distress
was universal, heartrending, and frightful. With millions in their
pockets, says a contemporary memoir, many did not know where to get