unpaid, and the largest loan that could for the moment be effected was
for a sum hardly meeting the expenses of the government for a single
day. At the first cabinet council Bonaparte was asked what he
intended to do. He replied, "I will pay cash or pay nothing." From
this time he conducted all his operations on this basis. He arranged
the assessments, funded the debt, and made payments in cash; and from
this time--during all the campaigns of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena,
Eylau, Friedland, down to the Peace of Tilsit in 1807--there was but
one suspension of specie payment, and this only for a few days. When
the first great European coalition was formed against the Empire,
Napoleon was hard pressed financially, and it was proposed to resort
to paper money; but he wrote to his minister, "While I live I will
never resort to irredeemable paper." He never did, and France, under
this determination, commanded all the gold she needed. When Waterloo
came, with the invasion of the Allies, with war on her own soil, with
a change of dynasty, and with heavy expenses for war and indemnities,
France, on a specie basis, experienced no severe financial distress.

If we glance at the financial history of France during the
Franco-Prussian War and the Communist struggle, in which a far more
serious pressure was brought upon French finances than our own recent
Civil War put upon American finance, and yet with no national
stagnation or distress, but with a steady progress in prosperity, we
shall see still more clearly the advantage of meeting a financial
crisis in an honest and straightforward way, and by methods sanctioned
by the world's most costly experience, rather than by yielding to
dreamers, theorists, phrase-mongers, declaimers, schemers, speculators
or to that sort of, "Reform" which is "the last refuge of a
scoundrel."[88]