desired.

The condition of opinion in the Assembly was, therefore, chaotic: a
few schemers and dreamers were loud and outspoken for paper money;
many of the more shallow and easy-going were inclined to yield; the
more thoughtful endeavored to breast the current.

One man there was who could have withstood the pressure: Mirabeau. He
was the popular idol,--the great orator of the Assembly and much more
than a great orator,--he had carried the nation through some of its
worst dangers by a boldness almost godlike; in the various conflicts
he had shown not only oratorical boldness, but amazing foresight. As
to his real opinion on an irredeemable currency there can be no doubt.
It was the opinion which all true statesmen have held, before his time
and since,--in his own country, in England, in America, in every
modern civilized nation. In his letter to Cerutti, written in
January, 1789, hardly six months before, he had spoken of paper money
as "A nursery of tyranny, corruption and delusion; a veritable debauch
of authority in delirium." In one of his early speeches in the
National Assembly he had called such money, when Anson covertly
suggested its issue, "a loan to an armed robber," and said of it:
"that infamous word, paper money, ought to be banished from our
language." In his private letters written at this very time, which
were revealed at a later period, he showed that he was fully aware of
the dangers of inflation. But he yielded to the pressure: partly
because he thought it important to sell the government lands rapidly
to the people, and so develop speedily a large class of small
landholders pledged to stand by the government which gave them their
titles; partly, doubtless, from a love of immediate rather than of
remote applause; and, generally, in a vague hope that the severe,