money came faster the successive periods of good feeling grew shorter.

Various bad signs began to appear. Immediately after each new issue
came a marked depreciation; curious it is to note the general
reluctance to assign the right reason. The decline in the purchasing
power of paper money was in obedience to the simplest laws in
economics, but France had now gone beyond her thoughtful statesmen and
taken refuge in unwavering optimism, giving any explanation of the new
difficulties rather than the right one. A leading member of the
Assembly insisted, in an elaborate speech, that the cause of
depreciation was simply the want of knowledge and of confidence among
the rural population and he suggested means of enlightening them. La
Rochefoucauld proposed to issue an address to the people showing the
goodness of the currency and the absurdity of preferring coin. The
address was unanimously voted. As well might they have attempted to
show that a beverage made by mixing a quart of wine and two quarts of
water would possess all the exhilarating quality of the original,
undiluted liquid.

Attention was aroused by another menacing fact;--specie disappeared
more and more. The explanations of this fact also displayed wonderful
ingenuity in finding false reasons and in evading the true one. A
very common explanation was indicated in Prudhomme's newspaper, "Les
Révolutions de Paris," of January 17, 1791, which declared that coin
"will keep rising until the people shall have hanged a broker."
Another popular theory was that the Bourbon family were, in some
mysterious way, drawing off all solid money to the chief centers of
their intrigues in Germany. Comic and, at the same time, pathetic,
were evidences of the wide-spread idea that if only a goodly number of
people engaged in trade were hanged, the par value of the _assignats_