Careless of all the teachings of history, you are exhorted to pay the national debt in greenbacks, knowing that this can be done only by creating successive batches, counted by hundreds of millions, which will bring our currency to the condition of Continental money, when a night’s lodging cost a thousand dollars, or the condition of the French _assignats_, the paper currency of the Revolution, which was increased to a fearful amount, precisely as it is now proposed to increase ours, until the story of Continental money was repeated. Talk of clipping the coin, or enfeebling it with alloy, as in mediæval times; talk of the disgraceful frauds of French monarchs, who, one after another in long succession, debased their money and swore the officers of the Mint to conceal the debasement; talk of persistent reductions in England, from Edward the First to Elizabeth, until coin was only the half of itself; talk of unhappy Africa, where Mungo Park found that a gallon of rum, which was the unit of value, was half water;--talk of all these; you have them on a colossal scale in the cheat of paying bonds with greenbacks. If not taught by our own memorable experience, when Continental money, which was the currency of the time, was lost, like the river Rhine at its mouth, in an enormous outstretched quicksand, then be taught by the experience of another country. Authentic history discloses the condition to which France was reduced. Carlyle, in his picturesque work on the Revolution, says: “There is, so to speak, no trade whatever, for the time being. _Assignats_, long sinking, emitted in such quantities, sink now with an alacrity beyond parallel.” The hackney-coachman on the street, when asked his fare, replied, “Six thousand livres.”[274] And still the _assignats_ sunk, until at last the nation was a pauper. The Directory, invested for the time with supreme power, on repairing to the palace of the Luxembourg, found it without a single article of furniture. Borrowing from the door-keeper a rickety table, an inkstand, and a sheet of letter-paper, they draughted their first official message, announcing the new government. There was not a solitary piece of coin in the Treasury; but there was a printing-press at command. _Assignats_ were fabricated in the night, and sent forth in the morning wet from the press.[275] At last they ended in nothing,--but not until a great and generous people was enveloped in bankruptcy and every family was a sufferer. Bankruptcy has its tragedies hardly inferior to those which throb beneath the “sceptred pall.”