The people themselves who observe, though they do not
reason, begin to have an idea that property exposes the safety of the
owner and that the legislature is less inexorable when guilt is
unproductive, than when the conviction of a criminal comprehends the
forfeiture of an estate.--A poor tradesman was lamenting to me yesterday,
that he had neglected an offer of going to live in England; and when I
told him I thought he was very fortunate in having done so, as he would
have been declared an emigrant, he replied, laughing, _"Moi emigre qui
n'ai pas un sol:"_ ["I am emigrant, who am not worth a halfpenny!"]--No,
no; they don't make emigrants of those who are worth nothing. And this
was not said with any intended irreverence to the Convention, but with
the simplicity which really conceived the wealth of the emigrants to be
the cause of the severity exercised against them.
The commercial and political evils attending a vast circulation of
assignats have been often discussed, but I have never yet known the
matter considered in what is, perhaps, its most serious point of view--I
mean its influence on the habits and morals of the people. Wherever I
go, especially in large towns like this, the mischief is evident, and, I
fear, irremediable. That oeconomy, which was one of the most valuable
characteristics of the French, is now comparatively disregarded.
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