Was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public debts?  Assume that it was not, and that a loss must be incurred somewhere.  When the only estate lawfully possessed, and which the contracting parties had in contemplation at the time in which their bargain was made, happens to fail, who, according to the principles of natural and legal equity, ought to be the sufferer?  Certainly it ought to be either the party who trusted, or the party who persuaded him to trust, or both; and not third parties who had no concern with the transaction.  Upon any insolvency, they ought to suffer who were weak enough to lend upon bad security, or they who fraudulently held out a security that was not valid.  Laws are acquainted with no other rules of decision.  But by the new institute of the rights of men, the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be saved harmless:  those are to answer the debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers, mortgagers nor mortgagees.

What had the clergy to do with these transactions?  What had they to do with any public engagement further than the extent of their own debt?  To that, to be sure, their estates were bound to the last acre.  Nothing can lead more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy.  The body of confiscators, true to that moneyed interest for which they were false to every other, have found the clergy competent to incur a legal debt.  Of course they declared them legally entitled to the property which their power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate implied:  recognizing the rights of those persecuted citizens in the very act in which they were thus grossly violated.

If, as I said, any persons are to mate good deficiencies to the public creditor, besides the public at large, they must be those who managed the agreement.  Why, therefore, are not the estates of all the comptrollers-general confiscated?[100] Why not those of the long succession of ministers, financiers, and bankers who have been enriched whilst the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels?  Why is not the estate of M. Laborde declared forfeited rather than of the Archbishop of Paris, who has had nothing to do in the creation or in the jobbing of the public funds?  Or, if you must confiscate old landed estates in favor of the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined to one description?  I do not know whether the expenses of the Duke de Choiseul have left anything of the infinite sums which he had derived from the bounty of his master, during the transactions of a reign which contributed largely, by every species of prodigality in war and peace, to the present debt of France.  If any such remains, why is not this confiscated?  I remember to have been in Paris during the time of the old government.  I was there just after the