thought a proper method of governing a country to manufacture instead
of promoting manufactures? to possess property instead of creating
more possessions and more diverse ones? In Rabourdin's system the
State exacted no money security; he allowed only mortgage securities;
and for this reason: Either the State holds the security in specie,
and that embarrasses business and the movement of money; or it invests
it at a higher rate than the State itself pays, and that is a
contemptible robbery; or else it loses on the transaction, and that is
folly; moreover, if it is obliged at any time to dispose of a mass of
these securities it gives rises in certain cases to terrible
bankruptcy.

The territorial tax did not entirely disappear in Rabourdin's plan,
--he kept a minute portion of it as a point of departure in case of war;
but the productions of the soil were freed, and industry, finding raw
material at a low price, could compete with foreign nations without
the deceptive help of customs. The rich carried on the administration
of the provinces without compensation except that of receiving a
peerage under certain conditions. Magistrates, learned bodies,
officers of the lower grades found their services honorably rewarded;
no man employed by the government failed to obtain great consideration
through the value and extent of his labors and the excellence of his
salary; every one was able to provide for his own future and France
was delivered from the cancer of pensions. As a result Rabourdin's
scheme exhibited only seven hundred millions of expenditures and
twelve hundred millions of receipts. A saving of five hundred millions
annually had far more virtue than the accumulation of a sinking fund
whose dangers were plainly to be seen. In that fund the State,
according to Rabourdin, became a stockholder, just as it persisted in
being a land-holder and a manufacturer. To bring about these reforms