can continent, and to French speculators and French merchants a sphere of wealth and influence was opened, which drew upon its surface the great mass of those who had either money to invest or money to procure. When Necker became a clerk in his uncle's counting-house, in Geneva, he might have calculated upon a course of action more brilliant than that in which he was afterwards thrown; and it was with some reluctance that, as the Mississippi forts were one by one captured, and Dupleiss by battle after battle was driven. from the Carnatic, he took an inferior place in the great banking establishment, of which M. Thelusson was the head. By his connection with the East India company, to whose notice he was introduced by a very able tract he published in 1769, in their defence, he had received large additions to his fortune; and as he became their official organ in their transactions with the government, he was enabled, through his knowledge of the probable tendency of the public funds, to invest most lucratively the capital he had acquired. Like M. Thiers, he has been accused of making use of his ministerial functions to depress or excite securities in which he was interested, though with very little reason, as the transactions which were called in question took place before he entered into the government, when the only information which he possessed was such as a keen mind might easily have gathered from the ordinary occurrences of the state. With means so great, and with faculties of using them so liberal, he retired from commercial life some time before he was called into action as a statesman. By his Eloge de Colbert, he gained the crown of the French academy a short period after he retired from his banking-house; and with his Essai sur la Législation et le Commerce des Grains, (1775,) he entered prominently into the contest that was then so furiously raging between the economists of the old and the new schools. He reached the goal by a road on which his rivals had not thought of entering. Dropping the confused metaphysical nomenclature which had made the study of finance a species of algebraic transcendentalism, he put down statistics in round numbers, he dressed working facts in working clothes, and he levelled his tracts at the comprehension of every man who, be he king or peasant, had been baffled by the charlatanism of the old philosophers. That he was conclusive, we may doubt; but that he was clear, admits of no question-as the leaders of the people and the dependents of the crown seized on the one idea he uncovered, and locked it up exultingly in the strong place where they kept their household truths. Through the Marquis of Pezay, he obtained the ear of royalty itself, and in a short period transmitted to the king an exposition of the finances of the realm, which was plain enough to be understood by their royal receiver, and was flattering enough to accelerate the elevation of the man who had reduced them into system. In the end of 1776, Necker was associated with Taboureau, in the comptroller-generalship of the finances; and eight months afterwards, by Taboureau's resignation, he was left without a colleague in an office, at that momentous period, the most important in the realm.

It was then for the first time that the Geneva banker was brought within the presence of the descendant of Henry IV. and the child of Maria Theresa. Great names must have stood on the wall before him, as he touched the carpet that had been trod by St. Louis, by the protestant king of Navarre, and by their recreant and apostate successors. In that little chamber had been determined the adventures of French royalty from the

first crusade of Louis III. to the last debauch of Louis XV.; and who can wonder that the protestant reforming minister felt his limbs fettered in every fresh motion, by the cob-webs which formed the archives of the cabinet? "I still remember," he said, a long time after, "the steep dark staircase to M. de Maurepa's apartments, up which I used to mount with fear and despondency, not very clear how a new idea might succeed with him, which occupied all my attention, and which often tended to produce an increase of the revenue by some just but rigid curtailment. I still remember that little cabinet, shaded by the roof of the Versailles palace, but above the king's apartments, and which by its compression and loftiness, really seemed the essence (and a very refined essence too) of human vanity and ambition. There was I obliged to discourse on reform and economy to a minister grown old in the pomps and formalities of a court. I remember the address I was obliged to use to succeed; and how, after many repulses, I sometimes obtained a little attention to the public, as a recompense for the resources I found in the midst of war. I still remember the bashfulness I felt, when I introduced in the discourses I ventured to address to him, some of those grand moral ideas with which I was animated. I then appeared as gothic to this old courtier as Sully did to the young ones, when he appeared at the court of Louis XIII." Ignorant of the rules of courts, unacquainted with the perquisites of royalty, who can wonder that Necker found himself out of gear the moment he became part of the motive power of the carriage of state? Set about with cumbrous wheels and heavy trappings, the principles of action he developed could produce little effect on a system so monstrous and so unmanageable. Never were two motive powers more antagonistical than those which were brought into play by the queen and the new minister. Plain, opinionated, severe in his manners and tastes, attaching an exorbitant value to the habits of punctuality and vigor, by which his great fortune had been acquired, Necker was an object of amazement and dislike to the council which had taken its stand around the remaining bulwarks of royal prerogative. Like an artisan, whose mechanical endowments were the sole cause of his introduction to court, was he regarded by the plumed and vizored champions of the queen of France; and as he approached the old and gorgeous turrets of the castle, as he lifted his hand to tear down a useless tower, or a tottering wall, his limbs were fettered and his action cramped, till he gave up the task in despair. Well would it have been for the citadel of royalty if the bastile had been levelled by the hand of reform, before it had been torn down by the storm of rebellion!

The character of Marie Antoinette can never be fully understood. The lovely drapery in which she was drawn by Mr. Burke, in the most splendid of his writings, clings to her with a tenacity which no hand is sacrilegious enough to disturb. It is said that when lately, on the exhumation of Charles I., the remains of the beheaded monarch were brought to light, his features were found unshrunk in their original quiet beauty, while the calm blue eye, which to the royal painters of his day had been an object of so great study, remained canonized by time in that same expression of sedate composure in which the artist had delighted to represent it. With recollections still more touching has the memory of Queen Marie Antoinette been associated. We look upon her as she appeared to the statesman-philosopher of the age, as she shone upon him from amongst the mist of court ceremony just sixteen years before the consummation which fell

back on its originators with so terrible a recoil. We drop those intermediate scenes of intrigue and oppression, of deception and violence, which were spread out by the hand of the Austrian council who surrounded the royal chamber, and we drop them in justice to a principle of humanity, which can never be violated without punishment. The execution of the

king and queen, in that last terrible act of the drama, did more than balance the account, in the sympathies at least, of mankind. By them, personally, it was not deserved. By the king, personally, it was wholly unmerited. Kind and humane in his sensibilities, just though vacillating in his opinions, he had been willing from the beginning, had his wishes been allowed full play, to concede the more moderate demands of the reformers. But to concede or to reform, when the whole system was corrupt, would have required powers far greater than those which he possessed. The abuses of his ancestors he could not remove without tearing down the temple that sheltered him; and like an ancient column which supports on its solitary pedestal the accumulated weight of frieze and roof, he became conscious that each stone that was removed from the shaft, each gewgaw that was removed from the capital, would accelerate that ruin which had already swiftly advanced. Gathering himself, therefore, within his robes, the victim, not of his own error, but of the crimes of his ancestors, he prepared himself in calmness for the storm which he might have hastened, but which he could never have prevented.

The finances of the realm at the time of the accession of Necker, were confused beyond description. Like the princess in the fable, who feared that her web might be finished before the time when it was to be displayed, the Bourbon financiers had tangled in the night season far more than they had extricated in the day. An administration of fifty years, without wars and without wants, it was stated by Raband,* would have been scarcely sufficient to restore the harmony of the system. It was with the reduction of the most prominent exuberances, that Necker commenced the work. By dint of the hosts of sinecurists who were stationed at the mouth of each stream of revenue which poured in upon the crown, and who sucked from it more than half its treasures, the revenue had been diminished as the machinery of taxation increased. Before the coin which was deposited in the hands of the tax-collector at one end of the kingdom, had reached the hands of the tax-receiver at the other, it was clipped and ground so successfully, that not only its quantity but its quality became uncertain. The Intendans des Finances constituted a regiment which was among the best paid, and the least efficient of the king's treasury guards; and one of the first acts of the new minister was to disband the Intendans des Finances at a blow. Composed, however, of members of the most ancient and most wealthy families, it was not without a struggle that the officers of the dismissed cohort consented to leave their posts; and it may be questioned whether the bitter repugnance with which Necker's measures were received by the nobility in general, may not have arisen from the personal offence which his retrenchments afforded. Too weak to support the king by the communion of their inherent strength, too proud to acquire fresh power by the reduction of the most odious of their pretensions, the peers of the land, by their clamorous opposition to the slightest reform, invited and anticipated, in the weakest quarter, the attack which was soon to burst

* History of the Revolution, p. 84.

upon them. They might have fallen back on their ancient reserved rights; they might, in conjunction with their king, have done battle under cover of their feudal moats and parapets; but with a folly which both increased and exposed their weakness, they marched out in full state from their fortresses, and courted the war on the most untenable precincts of their most exaggerated prerogative.

It was at this period that the French participation in the American war commenced. Great must have been the feeling of rivalry against Great Britain, and great the pressure of popular sympathy with the United States from without, to have induced the court of Louis XVI., incrusted with aristocratic prejudices, and entangled with financial embarrassment, to enter into the lists, yoked with a score of rebel colonies. The queen had been brought up with that high-bred horror of reform which charac terized the Austrian family, and yet the queen offered her crown-jewels, the very jewels over which clouds of suspicion so long had hung, to advance the cause of insurgents, whose principles she must have detested. Perhaps there was a deeper motive at play than pique towards Great Britain. A little compromise so made with the popular party, might have diverted to another channel that ambition which would otherwise have struck at home. The fish-women would have had no ammunition to scatter on the train of domestic sedition, if their powder had been already shipped across the Atlantic. The young nobility of the realm would have exhausted the stock of their republicanism by planting it in the wilds of the new world. Necker was pressed by every consideration which court influence could bear, to force loans which should assist so desirable a consummation. In the course of his administration five hundred and thirty millions (23,187,500/.) were borrowed, on terms certainly in themselves advantageous, though as they were swelled in the course of ten years by subsequent loans under succeeding administrations, to the amount of fifteen hundred millions, (65,625,0007.) they laid the corner-stone for that great edifice of guilt and oppression which nothing but revolution could

remove.

It has been said that when the sense of governmental responsibility is weakened by the diffusion of the governing power over a great mass of points, the vigor of action, as well as of the energy of conscience, will in a proportionable degree be diminished. Republics, we are told, must be faithless, because the inherent honesty which is claimed to belong to man as an individual, does in no sense belong to mankind in a community. Conscience, like electricity, runs in a single indivisible current, and the moment it is scattered, it loses the virtue of its strength. As a nation, we seem tacitly admitting the justice of the theory. It is forgotten that as yet our faith has been unspotted, and that from the organization of our government, debts contracted under pressures the most serious, and in markets the most costive, have been paid to the remotest penny, with a punctuality and completeness which in the history of the world has never been equalled. Compare, for instance, the fate of the three great public debts which were incurred by the three nations who formed parties in the American war. France, the model of an old feudal despotism, exhibiting at the period a spectacle of concentration unrivalled in the continent of Europe, entered into the market under the lead of a financier of consummate ability and experience; and yet France, with a people of great enterprise, with a country of great richness, with political influence une

qualled in its generation, repudiated by the action of king, parliament, and people, the debt it had so sacredly assumed. Great Britain, with internal wealth still greater, with foreign resources almost as great, by a species of management which continues the scar on the administration of Mr. Pitt, has postponed without limit the liquidation of the loans which were at the same period taken. If the word repudiation should ever be introduced into our vocabulary, if it is to be bandied from mouth to mouth as an item of every-day adjustment, and its occurrence as a possible contingency, let it be remembered that it is limited in its origin to the present generation; that it was cradled among us in the manhood of the republic; that in the weakness of our infancy it was never once contemplated, and that it was reserved for the present moment, when we have quadrupled our wealth, our territory, and our people, to interpolate in that noble code which so far has directed us, a principle so disastrous and so dishonorable.

In the beginning of 1781, the influence of Necker had risen to a pitch which made him at once an object of idolatry to the people and of suspicion to the court. Imprudent as now appears the system of loans which stimulated to unnatural luxuriance the credit of the country, their immediate effect was to inspire that general confidence which the influx of wealth from abroad must create. But Necker found that while he was the minister who of all others was held forth to the public view as supreme, he was stripped in the cabinet of all power except so much as was contained in the mere machinery of the treasury department. A seat in the privy council was a necessary attribute of his office; and though he was partially disqualified from its possession by his religion, he recollected that Sully before him had been both protestant and prime minister, and he consequently, in April, 1781, made a formal application to the king for the honors of the cabinet. Maurepas was the nominal premier, and to Maurepas the superficial distribution of the crown patronage belonged; but the old minister had been too prudent to act precipitately on his own authority, or perhaps too jealous of Necker to act at all for his elevation, and he consequently advised the ambitious comptroller to apply in person to the queen. The result might have been easily foreseen. Marie Antoinette had suffered Necker to remain in office in the distance; but a near approach to the crown was more than she could allow. An answer was asked for an answer was given, and, in an evil hour for both king and queen, the proposition of Necker was rejected, and he himself banished to his estate of St. Owen.

It was when in the forced retirement that followed, that the principal essays of Necker were written. By his Compte Rendu, he took off the veil which had so long hung over the financial operations of the realm, and displayed the character and operations of his short ministerial supremacy; while by his De l'Administration des Finances, he entered into a labored exposition of the whole internal machinery of the French monetary system. Incorrect as must have been some of the details, in a mass so cumbrous and confused, wild as may have been some of the theories he espoused, he possessed a faculty which was unknown to his predecessors. The scheme which he placed before him he understood distinctly, and when once the task was undertaken, he was able to make it understood by others. His report was read throughout France, and as it was the only work of the kind that had ever been comprehended, its author was looked