wrong and gross fraud. Men who had foreseen these results and had
gone into debt were of course jubilant. He who in 1790 had borrowed
10,000 _francs_ could pay his debts in 1796 for about 35 _francs_.
Laws were made to meet these abuses. As far back as 1794 a plan was
devised for publishing official "tables of depreciation" to be used in
making equitable settlements of debts, but all such machinery proved
futile. On the 18th of May, 1796, a young man complained to the
National Convention that his elder brother, who had been acting as
administrator of his deceased father's estate, had paid the heirs in
_assignats_, and that he had received scarcely one three-hundredth
part of the real value of his share.[67] To meet cases like this, a
law was passed establishing a "scale of proportion." Taking as a
standard the value of the _assignat_ when there were two billions in
circulation, this law declared that, in payment of debts, one-quarter
should be added to the amount originally borrowed for every five
hundred millions added to the circulation. In obedience to this law a
man who borrowed two thousand _francs_ when there were two billions in
circulation would have to pay his creditors twenty-five hundred
_francs_ when half a billion more were added to the currency, and over
thirty-five thousand _francs_ before the emissions of paper reached
their final amount. This brought new evils, worse, if possible, than
the old.[68]

The question will naturally be asked, _On whom did this vast
depreciation mainly fall at last_? When this currency had sunk to
about one three-hundredth part of its nominal value and, after that,
to nothing, in whose hands was the bulk of it? The answer is simple.
I shall give it in the exact words of that thoughtful historian from
whom I have already quoted: "Before the end of the year 1795 the paper
money was almost exclusively in the hands of the working classes,