would stimulate business; that it would give to all capitalists, large
or small, the means for buying from the nation the ecclesiastical real
estate, and that from the proceeds of this real estate the nation
would pay its debts and also obtain new funds for new necessities:
never was theory more seductive both to financiers and statesmen.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the statesmen of France,
or the French people, were ignorant of the dangers in issuing
irredeemable paper money. No matter how skillfully the bright side of
such a currency was exhibited, all thoughtful men in France remembered
its dark side. They knew too well, from that ruinous experience,
seventy years before, in John Law's time, the difficulties and dangers
of a currency not well based and controlled. They had then learned
how easy it is to issue it; how difficult it is to check its
overissue; how seductively it leads to the absorption of the means of
the workingmen and men of small fortunes; how heavily it falls on all
those living on fixed incomes, salaries or wages; how securely it
creates on the ruins of the prosperity of all men of meagre means a
class of debauched speculators, the most injurious class that a nation
can harbor,--more injurious, indeed, than professional criminals whom
the law recognizes and can throttle; how it stimulates overproduction
at first and leaves every industry flaccid afterward; how it breaks
down thrift and develops political and social immorality. All this
France had been thoroughly taught by experience. Many then living had
felt the result of such an experiment--the issues of paper money under
John Law, a man who to this day is acknowledged one of the most
ingenious financiers the world has ever known; and there were then
sitting in the National Assembly of France many who owed the poverty
of their families to those issues of paper. Hardly a man in the
country who had not heard those who issued it cursed as the authors of