It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions, caused by the extreme rigor and the extreme laxity of this new public faith, which influenced in this transaction, and which influenced not according to the nature of the obligation, but to the description of the persons to whom it was engaged.  No acts of the old government of the kings of France are held valid in the National Assembly, except its pecuniary engagements:  acts of all others of the most ambiguous legality.  The rest of the acts of that royal government are considered in so odious a light that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime.  A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the state.  It is a better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that service.  We have, however, seen multitudes of people under this description in France, who never had been deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times, by this assembly of the rights of men robbed without mercy.  They were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.

This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate persons.  The Assembly, with perfect consistency, it must be owned, is engaged in a respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations under the former government; and their committee is to report which of them they ought to ratify, and which not.  By this means they have put the external fidelity of this virgin state on a par with its internal.

It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of rewarding service and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative, than that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state, actual and possible.  The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of any king in Europe.  To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse.  It goes far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation.  The acts, however, of that dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred.  Whence arose this preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriving its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the exertions of monarchical authority?  Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile inconsistency; nor can partial favor be accounted for upon equitable principles.  But the contradiction and partiality which admit no justification are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause I do not think it difficult to discover.