The Assembly, it is true, did at length endeavour to face the whole financial position, and to establish at any rate its current finances on a firm and permanent footing. But the manner in which it made the attempt was sufficient to ensure its failure. The expenses of the Revolution had necessarily been very large. The Assembly had, no doubt, cut down the expenses of the Court, of the army, and of the Church; but it had at the same time undertaken new and very heavy burdens. The cost of the new system of local government and of the new system of administering justice involved a large increase in the annual expenditure. The cost of compensating the officers suppressed in the Law, the Church, and the public services, of pensioning off the dispossessed ecclesiastics, and of buying out the innumerable vested interests at which the reforms of the Assembly had struck, alone amounted to an enormous sum. There were all the debts of the Ancien Régime to be taken over, and besides that all the deficits in the current accounts, which steadily accumulated, month after month, down to the end of 1790. The property of the Church, which was at first regarded as an inexhaustible treasure, and estimated at much beyond its real value, disappointed the expectations of its new possessors, as they saw it frittered away in issues of Assignats. The abolition of tithes, though a great benefit to the proprietors of land, had in no way enriched the Exchequer. The abolition of feudal dues, though a heavy loss to their old possessors and an infinite gain to the nation at large, had brought nothing into the coffers of the State. The cessation of the hated Gabelle and of many other indirect taxes, which the people had refused any longer to pay, and which the Assembly, making a virtue of necessity, had accordingly abolished, had cut away one large source of revenue. It remained to find the means of making good the deficiency and of providing for the charges which the Revolution had imposed.