MIRABEAU
tion. Inconsistent and pusillanimous! What! Do you not perceive that, in decreeing a public bankruptcy, or, what is worse, in rendering it inevitable without decreeing it, you disgrace yourselves by an act a thousand times more criminal, and—folly inconceivable!—gratuitously criminal? For, in the shocking alternative I have supposed, at least the deficit would be wiped off.
But do you imagine that, in refusing to pay, you shall cease to owe? Think you that the thousands, the millions of men, who will lose in an instant, by the terrible explosion of a bankruptcy, or its revulsion, all that formed the consolation of their lives, and perhaps their sole means of subsistence—think you that they will leave you to the peaceable fruition of your crime? Stoical spectators of the incalculable evils which this catastrophe would disgorge upon France; impenetrable egotists, who fancy that these convulsions of despair and of misery will pass, as other calamities have passed—and all the more rapidly because of their intense violence—are you, indeed, certain that so many men without bread will leave you tranquilly to the enjoyment of those savory viands, the number and delicacy of which you are so loath to diminish? No! you will perish, and, in the universal conflagration, which you do not shrink from kindling, you will not, in losing your honor, save a single one of your detestable indulgences. This is the way we are going.
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