He is supposed to be competent in the affairs of both worlds; in reality he is one of those presuming, threadbare, talkative fellows, who, living in a garret, lecture foreign cabinets and reconstruct all Europe.

Things, to them, seem to be as easily worked out as words and sentences: one day,[2205] to entice the English into an alliance with France, Brissot proposes to place two towns, Dunkirk and Calais, in their hands as security; another day, he proposes "to make a descent on Spain, and, at the same time, to send a fleet to conquer Mexico."-- The leading member on the committee on finances is Cambon, a merchant from Montpellier, a good accountant, who, at a later period, is to simplify accounting and regulate the Grand Livre of the public debt, which means public bankruptcy.

Mean-while, he hastens this on with all his might by encouraging the Assembly to undertake the ruinous and terrible war that is to last for twenty-three years; according to him, "there is more money than is needed for it."[2206] In actual fact, the guarantee of assignats is used up and the taxes do not come in.

They live only on the paper money they issue.

The assignats lose forty per centum, and the ascertained deficit for 1792 is four hundred millions.[2207] But this revolutionary financier relies upon the confiscations which he instigates in France, and which are to be set agoing in Belgium; here lies all his invention, a systematic robbery on a grand scale within and without the kingdom.
As to the legislators and manufacturers of constitutions, we have Condorcet, a cold-blooded fanatic and systematic leveler, satisfied that a mathematical method suits the social sciences fed on abstractions, blinded by formuloe, and the most chimerical of perverted intellects.
Never was a man versed in books more ignorant of mankind; never did a lover of scientific precision better succeed in changing the character of facts.