But once the Assembly had entered on the downward course, it found it impossible to stop. The strong Government and the financial readjustment, which Mirabeau had hoped for, never came. The eight hundred millions went, as the four hundred millions had gone before them, and still there seemed to be no prospect of the debt ever being redeemed, or of a balance ever being established between the income and the expenditure of the State. Again and again the Government found that it must either face bankruptcy, or else get over its difficulties for the moment by fresh issues of paper money, and again and again, when the alternative had to be faced, it naturally chose the latter course. By June, 1791, the issue of the previous September had been exhausted, and casting its own prudent limitations to the winds, the Assembly issued six hundred millions more. From that time forward the depreciation of the paper money steadily and rapidly advanced. The Treasury, departing from the original proposal, had already begun to issue Assignats of quite small value. Paper money soon became the regular currency in which wages were paid; and even the poorest classes thus learned to feel the effects of its variations, and to make such profit out of those variations as they could. With the depreciation of the Assignats and the disappearance of specie, the rage for speculation, naturally stimulated by the rapidity of political change, took hold of the public mind, and the spirit of gambling increased in all classes the unrest and fever of the time.