fifteen hundred million francs of Assignats which bore the image of the King. In vain had the Convention, in August 1794, decreed, on Cambon's proposal, the Republicanisation of the National Debt, ordered all the creditors of the State to send in their claims, entered their titles in a Great Ledger of the Public Debt, declared the capital borrowed by the State to be irrecoverable, and, regardless of all engagements entered into and of all promises of high interest previously made, informed them that in future the State would pay five per cent interest to all its creditors alike. This summary method of escaping liabilities had introduced, it is true, some order into the finances, but it had not improved the credit of the State. The chief resource of the Government had continued to be the Assignats, and not even the drastic legislation of the Terror had been able to keep their credit up. The repeal of that drastic legislation and the financial policy of the Convention in the winter of 1794-95 accelerated their decline[13]. Prices, no longer fixed by law, rose rapidly, as the value of the paper money fell. The Government, no longer able to rely on the methods which the Terrorists had used to swell their income, and face to face with high prices and diminishing credit, could think of no better resource than to issue Assignats faster than before; and of course with every fresh issue the depreciation increased. At the end of 1794, some seven thousand million francs of Assignats were in circulation. In May, 1795, these had risen to ten thousand millions, in the August following, to sixteen thousand millions, and in the October following that, to many thousand millions more. In proportion to these enormous issues, the value of the currency declined. At the end of the reign of Terror, Assignats had been worth 33 or 34 per cent of their nominal value. In December, 1794, they had fallen to 22 per cent. In the ensuing May they stood at 7 per cent, and in the months which followed they fell to 4, to 2, and even to less than 1 per cent. In vain different members of the Convention proposed schemes for diminishing the number. The Government had no other resource to look to, and its expenses seemed daily to increase, as claims for compensation poured in upon it from those who had suffered under the Terror. With the fall of the Assignats, prices rose to an alarming height. All wage-earners who could not raise their wages in proportion to the rapid rise in prices, all who lived upon fixed incomes, all who depended on the paper-money and whose small savings consisted of Assignats, suffered acutely from the economic crisis. A certain number of people, tenant farmers for instance, who paid their rent in Assignats, and who made it many times over by the high prices fetched by corn, debtors who could pay off long-standing debts in Assignats at their nominal value, and speculators, who sprang up on all sides to traffic in the fluctuations