cent in exchange for specie! Notwithstanding, however, of the boundless delusion under which men acted at this moment, it could not escape the eyes of the vigilant financier, that a constant and enormous drain of specie was going on,
either in the way of exportation to foreign countries, or for the consumption of the jewellers and goldsmiths. To answer the large orders of the wealthy Mississippians, and to guard against a run upon the bank in these circumstances, the
master-projector had again recourse to forced measures. Edicts were issued
declaring the value of bank-notes to be five per cent, above that of specie, and
forbidding the use of silver for the payment of any sum exceeding 100 livres,
or of gold in payments exceeding 300 livres. Law thought by these expedients
to confine the use of specie to small transactions alone, while those of any magnitude could still be conducted by the fictitious currency which he had called
into existence. At the same time, to give a fresh impulse to the stock-jobbing
transactions, which had experienced a perceptible decline, he presented himself
personally in his ministerial robes, and surrounded by a number of the nobility
in the Rue Quincampoix, where his presence instantly excited a lively sensation; and the report being industriously propagated that new edicts were about to be issued, conferring additional privileges on the great company, the actions which had fallen to 12,000 livres, rose to 15,000. Still the public creditors hesitated to employ the notes now issuing in extinction of their debts in purchasing India stock; and the enormous sum of 1,000,000,000, remained floating in the form of bank notes, for which no species of investment could be found.
A publication issued at this juncture by Law, under the title of Lettre à un Créancier, failed to satisfy their scruples, and actions again fell to 12,000 livres. Meanwhile, specie, in spite of successive depreciations effected upon it at the suggestion of the minister of finance, entirely disappeared; still the government kept issuing notes to the immense amount of 1,925,000,000, between the 1st of January, and the 20th of May, 1720, and the price of every thing advanced in almost hourly progression. On the llth of March, a second letter from the minister of finance appeared, in which he employed the most ingenious sophistry in defence of the exaggerated value at which the paper-currency was attempted to be maintained. The choice of a standard value, the great financier contended, was wholly a matter of opinion. To support the value of any article in the opinion of the community, it is only necessary to decline selling it under a certain price. Houses, lands, and other articles of property, have a certain value in the opinion of mankind, just because some people desire to purchase them, and others will not part with them; but if all the proprietors of houses and land were willing to get rid of their property at one and the same time, what value would it have in the market? It is easy to answer such palpable sophistry as this. Houses and lands are possessions fit for certain purposes which men require; it is their fitness which constitutes their value; but in the case of those shares whose value, Law contended, ought to be quite as real as that of any other article of property, it is most evident that they have no value, unless the profit to be derived from commerce in them be not proportioned to the price at which the stock was purchased; from the moment, in fact, that they cease to become marketable they are stripped of their value. A system supported by such desperate reasoning as Law had here recourse to, must have appeared tottering to its fall in the eyes of every rational man; the public credit of France was about to give way; the Atlantean shoulders on which it had been hitherto supported, could no longer prop the mighty burden. Government at last perceived that too great an extension had been given to what Law called credit, and that to re-establish the value of paper, it would be necessary
