own translation in the most absurd terms they could devise, after having once refused to register it altogether, they were at last starved into submission from the dread of the president lest a country winter should injure his health.

At a later period the clergy began to interfere in the matter, It was sufficiently dangerous when two parties were contending for the limits of an undefined authority, but now there were three. Louis XV., who cared not what was said in the dispute provided he was not obliged to hear it, kept aloof from its settlement from sheer indolence and thus adopted of all others the most insolent mode of denying the parliamentary prerogatives he would not condescend even to explain himself to them. The parliament rebelled, naturally enough, against this treatment; the king found that they interfered with his quiet, and was at very little pains to disguise his hatred. The consequence was a series of dissensions which, in some form or other, were never altogether intermitted.

In 1730, these quarrels arose to a most violent height, a series of ordonnances having taken away from the parliament the right of deliberation altogether. The parliament came to the resolution of making a personal visit to the king, then at Marly when arrived, they planted themselves in the vestibule of the palace, where the first president begged an audience of his majesty. The Duke de Noailles, scandalized at their position, brought them into the banquet-room, but the king sent an immediate message declining to receive them; and Fleury rushed into the room in great agitation imploring them to return to Paris. Shortly after the king assembled the whole body, enjoined the strictest silence after his speech should be finished, and then gave them to understand that everything they had done was null and void, and that he should treat as a rebel any member who disobeyed his orders. The first president could only reply that "it was forbidden them to express to the king even the excess of their grief." At a subsequent audience, after a discourse of the king, the president was about to speak when the king interrupted him with, "Hold your tongue, sir;" and all that the chiefs of the opposition could do was to lay a written paper at the feet of the king, which was torn to pieces before their faces. The parliament then adopted a singular mode of revenge: they assembled and remained for hours in their places without a single word being spoken. The ministry argued the president remained silent: the ministry threatened-the president only said that he had too much respect for them to answer. Meanwhile the usual fires of squibs and ballads was kept up on both sides. The ministry actually succeeded in depriving

Pucelles, the leader of the opposition, of his popularity for a time, by a punning song upon his name; while the ministry themselves were sung throughout the streets to every possible strain of ribaldry and abuse-so childish was the mode of warfare by which the destinies of the government of a great nation were decided!

We have already alluded to the vague and unsystematic mode in which the taxes were collected in France and its natural consequence the gross corruption on the part of the collectors. Every fair proposition during the reign of Louis XIV. had been rejected at once, as interfering with the privileges of the nobility. During the more prosperous part of that reign, the able financiers then employed managed to keep the treasury in decent order; but the consequences of a ruinous war and the universal relaxation which followed, combined with the effects of the enormous personal expenses of the king, threw the finances into such disorder that, at his death, the confusion both of the accounts and the mode of obtaining public money defied all attempts to organize a proper system. Various projects served to procure temporary relief: the plundering collectors were forced to disgorge great part of their wealth to the universal satisfaction of the people; but these expedients served only for the present and the prospects of the future were more hopeless than ever.

In the midst of all this difficulty the two great elements of modern enterprise-the banking system and that of public companies were first introduced into France. Both of these systems, wherever established heretofore, arose spontaneously out of the financial and commercial conveniences of the respective communities, and had in no case been suggested as an extraneous remedy for their pecuniary difficulties. The banks arose, in the first instance, from the necessity of regulating the exchanges, rendered the more fluctuating from the uncertain value of coin in its own country. From this business to that of issuing the paper representation of coin, the transition was simple and easy. The public companies arose from the inability of private capital, in those days, to compass the new schemes which were offered by the growing facilities of foreign intercourse. Meanwhile, the establishment of colonies in America and settlements in the East assisted the development of the new impulses given to enterprise, and of the new cravings of ambition, avarice, or social wants, which were occasioned by them.

To the progress of all these things the temper and habits of the French people were peculiarly adverse. The limited na

ture of the commercial transactions required no demand for a more extended circulation than that of the current coin: in fact, at a period much later, it was calculated that the same piece of money passed through fewer hands in France in the course of the year than almost any country in Europe-fewer by eight times than in England. Then, as now, much of the coin was buried by the proprietors, who were unwilling to trust their money to a less secure guardian than their mother earth. And while this particular use of the banks was thus uncalled for, that of rendering the standard of coin itself more fixed was daily becoming of lessimportance, as the increasing certainty of mercantile operations put an end to former fluctuation.

But if the establishment of the banking system was in France simply unnecessary, the establishment of companies of commerce and colonization was directly contrary to the habits and disposition of the people. The Frenchman was in his glory when figuring before the multitude: the risks of life and limb were nothing to him while people were looking on; but he had very little notion of encountering difficulties in distant and unpeopled regions where the only witnesses of his prowess would be the eagle and the rattlesnake. Ever open to new impressions, he was but little fitted for enterprises only to be effected by the most entire singleness of purpose: as deficient in passive as he was redundant in active energy, he sunk at once under difficulties and misfortune. Still less did the necessities of the country require any migration of its inhabitants at a time when the country could well have supported five times its population.

Neither of the two systems, therefore, were in France of spontaneous growth; but, when once suggested, there was much to tempt a statesman to listen to them. A governmental issue of bank-notes was an immediate increase of the governmental wealth by just so much value as the credit of the government could maintain constantly in circulation: it was of all plans ever devised for borrowing from the public the easiest, the most ready, and the least expensive. The government, by supplying the wants of the community, poured at once into its coffers a vast proportion of the gold of the kingdom, most of which, while the State maintained its credit, would never be demanded of it again. It was no wonder if the Duke of Orleans, himself a man intensely fond of novelty and excitement, was enchanted with such a scheme, when even the gravest of his councillors, who at first could scarcely be induced by his authority to listen to its provisions, began themselves to discover that so easy a plan of raising money was worth consideration. The advan

tage to the people at large was beyond their comprehension, but the advantage to the treasury was comprehensible enough. For once, the proposer of the scheme was amongst the first to profit by it. Dukes and peers of France had but little notion of banking matters, and were forced, in spite of themselves, to give up the management of the new arrangements to a man whose experience, national and individual, enabled him to carry them out; and a needy Scotch adventurer found means to domi neer over the finance-soon almost over the society-of the proudest country of Europe.

In itself, the establishment by law of a public bank would have been a boon even to France. Anti-commercial and antispeculating as was the general genius of the people, there was enough, both of commerce and speculation, to make desirable a system of credit which might render monetary transactions more easy, and serve likewise to fix more firmly the value of the metallic currency, still liable to be tampered with. But an establishment which required the most delicate care in its management was subjected to the caprice of men the most careless and incautious in times of peculiar excitement and instability.

The prudence, not of the Duke of Orleans, but of the wisest head that ever existed, would scarcely have sufficed to withstand the temptations of the moment. The banks of the Mississippi and the wide fields of Canada had been represented as teeming with wealth, not only of gold and silver, but of every production which nature has made valuable. The profit from such a source, confined hitherto to the merchant and the adventurer, was thrown open to the whole world. The advantages of private enterprise in public companies, long known in England, were presented to the astonished gaze of the French in the most sudden and the fullest magnificence. The people, who seldom stopped to consider contingencies, and who of all nations were noted for the desire of getting rich at once without the labour of adding pound to pound, set no bounds to their extravagant eagerness to embark in the new schemes. It would have been marvellous, indeed, if the government who reaped the profits of their folly had endeavoured to stop it.

But the profits which the government could obtain for shares were less easy and immediate than those which they obtained for notes. Paper-money, for a while, was actually at a premium above the silver which it represented. The regent scattered it about in all directions without remorse or consideration, and was only stopped occasionally by the absolute impossibility of obtaining from the mills a sufficient supply of the raw paper. Law

complained timidly and quietly: himself a man essentially of system, he had the fullest confidence in his own: his ideas respecting them were sound and beyond his age; and, had he been left to himself, he might have doubled the wealth of the kingdom without danger to its credit. But even he seems to have been carried away by the intoxication of the moment: amidst the flatteries of the greatest and the caresses of the most beautiful-placed within reach of the highest dignities of the State and in possession of the most unbounded influence-he forgot the rising current of the irresistible stream which he was only damming with a board.

One old street, in the centre of old Paris, had long been the chief seat of the trifling monetary transactions for which the capital had occasion hitherto. The street Quincampaix contained about sixty houses, blackened and decayed with age, with narrow passages and battlements that threatened to tumble down at the first opportunity. A crowd of Jews and usurers inhabited the place, who sometimes discounted government bills and paper of value; but their chief operations were the lending money to small tradesmen and people of the market, often merely by the hour, on the security of small wares and baskets of provisions. This villanous locality became the rendezvous of the system the old walls, accustomed to the clink of a few pence, resounded with bargains involving the price of an empire: the crowd became so great that the police were obliged to barricade the entrance: the most miserable rooms let for enormous sums; till at last the speculators, driven fairly out of doors, transacted their business without shelter in the midst of the most violent storms or the most rigorous cold. Knighterrants like their fathers-but in the service of a different mistress-wind and weather became totally indifferent to the pampered nobility of Paris: two hundred thousand livres were paid yearly for a single house.

The road to fortune was open to all the world: the nobleman chaffered beside his lacquey, the lady beside her lover, the debtor beside his creditor, the banker beside the beggar. Even to us the scene of excitement would appear sufficiently striking. What must it have seemed to those accustomed to the regime of the old court, with its starched habits, uncompromising etiquette, detestation of theory, and contempt of commerce? Meanwhile, those who had occasion to examine the system more closely began to perceive its rottenness. The Duke de Noailles, provoked by some slights from Law, collected all the notes he could lay his hands on, and brought away a heap of gold from the