The aegis & intelligencer. [volume] (Bel Air, Md.) 1864-1923, 1865-02-10

Some ingenuity was required, however,
to turn the new-found property to account
Ready money was wanted, and to get this
the estates of the church had to be sold !;
but to have brought them all into the mar
ket at once would have been, of course, in
the last degree impolitic, since their value
would have been thereby sensibly affected.
A device was therefore resorted to, which
is said to have been first suggested by Bal
ly, the Mayor of Paris, and which, while
it kept up the price of the land, put the
administration in immediate possession OF
a new circulating medium. The property
of the clergy was transferred in the mass
to the various municipalities throughout
the country; and by them the contiguous
estates were sold in detail, and as purchas
ers offered At first the municipal au-
thoriies had no mo2cy to pay for the pos
sessions with which they were invested,
and they gave bills at varying dateS
instead but as the land was taken up,
and the proceeds came into their hands,
they became gradually possessed Of funds,
ana thus able to meet the obligations
which they had undertaken. These bills
thdn, which the government held, were
Of unquestiouable value, and might have
been paid away at any time as an equiv
alent for coin, but they were usually
of large amount, and the state had many
creditors 10 whom it owed smaller sums.
7 n.et their case, therefore, aud also to
protect the municipalities against too
great or too early pressure, subsidiary
arrangement was entered into. The large
bills were broken up as it were, in num-
Der of smaller promissory notes, and those
receiving the name of boas, furnished the
first notion of the assignat.
The expedient, however, gave only par
tial satisfaction and relief. When cred
itor of the state got bon paid over to
him, he received what was capable of be-
ing exchanged for something of real val
ue, but that something might be nothing
else than land, and he might not choose
to become the owner of that kind of prop
erty, or he might think the Revolution not
so certainly accomplished as to be able to
give him secure title to it; or he might
have conscientious scruples about laying
bis hand on the patrimony of the church,
aud in his hand the paper would be prac-
tically inconvertible. 1t was necessary,
therefore, for the sake of such persons,
and for other reasons, to advance further
step in the development of the scheme
The Assembly must give to the ASST gnat
the faculty Of circulation. This, after
some discussion, was done aud four hun
bred millions of what was now to all in
tents and purposes paper-money, were
sent forth from the national treasury; the
only difference between an assignat and
an ordinary bank-note being this, that
the former protested to carry interest
along with it.
Of course the clergy opposed themselves
vehemently to this plan of increasing the
revenue, and many were the arguments
which were employed both by them and by
their allies among the mobiles, (who fear
ed, and with some reason, that their turn
would come next,) to induce the Assem-
bly, to abandon scheme " hich was, they
coutended, not only irrelgious and I'M
prnci pied, but financially unsound The
name of the greet speculator, Law, for ex.
ample, was brought up, and the memory
of his bankruptcy r1y.,ed. He had is.
sued paper.ohliga cations, which, after vari-
Gus fluctuations, had gone down to moth
ing, and the paper that was now to be
thrown upon the country was sure, they
coatsudei, to run the same course. But
the two cases were not parallel, and the
inference, in consequences, unwarranted.-
The value Of laws paper-money depended
entirely on the profits to be gained by the
India Company, which might be mil;
while that Of the assignats was founded
upon a territorial capital, real aud easily
convertible. Given the success of the
Revolution, and an assurance that the acts
of TIC National Assembly were authorize,
tive, and the holder of Il bon was as safe
as if he held the equivalent in gold
But the French government had learn.
ed dangerous secret. 1t is so much cas-
Ter to roll money off printing. machine
than to dig it out of mine, or wiring it
oub Oh na'lon ny CaAes, Cnat tueTe uluSt
always be temptation to follow the first
method, if it can be safely put into opera
ton at all and in the course which was
now followed, Paris, we may say, showed
an example which Washington has been
only too ready to fol ow. The time came
soon enough when the national treasury
required to be again replenished, aud Mi
rabeau proposed the short and easy plan
of issuing eight hundred or thousand
million more assignats. This motion was,
of course, resisted by many; and among
others, by Talleyrand, who delivered re-
markabe speech in opposition to it,
Those who remember the relief-the sense
of positive fulness and wealth-which was
experience in America after the first Gre
alton of greenbacks, will not be surprised
to hear that similar results followed in
France. The four hundred millions which
had been formerly sent out had just been
so much money added to the currency
and apparent means of the country and