By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has insensibly grown up, and with it a great power.  By the ancient usages which prevailed in that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the mutual convertibility of land into money and of money into land, had always been a matter of difficulty.  Family settlements, rather more general and more strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of landed property held by the crown, and, by a maxim of the French law, held unalienably, the vast estates of the ecclesiastic corporations,—­all these had kept the landed and moneyed interests more separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country.

The moneyed property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the people.  They saw it connected with their distresses, and aggravating them.  It was no less envied by the old landed interests,—­partly for the same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it eclipsed, by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed pedigrees and naked titles of several among the nobility.  Even when the nobility, which represented the more permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage (which sometimes was the case) with the other description, the wealth which saved the family from ruin was supposed to contaminate and degrade it.  Thus the enmities and heart burnings of these parties were increased even by the usual means by which discord is made to cease and quarrels are turned into friendship.  In the mean time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble, or newly noble, increased with its cause.  They felt with resentment an inferiority the grounds of which they did not acknowledge.  There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend themselves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth to what they considered as its natural rank and estimation.  They struck at the nobility through the crown and the Church.  They attacked them particularly on the side on which they thought them the most vulnerable,—­that is, the possessions of the Church, which, through the patronage of the crown, generally devolved upon the nobility.  The bishoprics and the great commendatory abbeys were, with few exceptions, held by that order.

In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare between the noble ancient landed interest and the new moneyed interest, the greatest, because the most applicable, strength was in the hands of the latter.  The moneyed interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind.  Being of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any novelties.  It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.