Gazette Of The United States And Daily Evening Advertiser

FRENCH FUNDING SYSTEM.

Translated for the Centinel.

Report made by Johanot, in the name of the Committees of Public Safety, Legislature, and Finances, to the National Convention, the session of 20th Germinal.

"Citizens,

" A REFORM or amelioration of our Finances, would vainly have been undertaken, amidst the wrestling of factions, and the agitation of the public mind. To re-establish credit was impossible, while storms still thundered around the sanctuary of the laws. There are times when the most useful ideas are impotent: But thanks to your energy, they will again resume their empire Your last victory over anarchy, has been of important service to your Finances. You have rooted up your interior and exterior enemies; and their defeat has re-established our late tottering credit.

The prospect of an approaching Peace, and which is already concluded with one of the first military powers of Europe, gives a new basis to credit ; and we may once more build on a foundation, grown firm after so many shocks and tempests.

You will continue to secure the destiny of the public fortune, by giving a formidable and regular organization to the constitutional laws.

These laws are truly those of a free people; as they banish at once, both licentiousness, and slavery. To preserve to the people their rights, the exercise of them will no longer be placed in the hands of ignorance or crime—A memorable revolution has saved the French nation from the despotism of an individual—By a revolution still more memorable, your wisdom will save them from anarchy, which is the despotism of all.

We all begin to understand, that there are no governments conformable to the genuine rights of man, except those which are neither turbulent nor arbitrary.

This is the moment, in which a plan of Finance may be presented you with success —it is impossible to establish any without the order and unity of the same measures without interior peace, but more especially without a well organized constitution.

Your Committees have occupied themselves with the causes of the depreciation of assignats, with the excessive rise of necessaries and goods, paid for in assignats, with the means of diffusing order thro every part of the Republic; with the means to provide against the extraordinary expenses which the war still continues to exact -with the payment and reimbursement of the national debts, but especially to re-establish morality in all private contracts, between citizens. in all their active and passive relations with the Finances of the State. Morality in exterior concerns, is an able negotiator; in interior relations, it is the only power whose administration is reflected.

Your Committees, in order to facilitate their progress, had appointed a commission of five of its members, this commission consulted with several citizens, distinguished for their intelligence and integrity ; they presented your Committees with their proceedings, your Committees have a long time discussed them, applied such amendments as they deemed necessary, and now offer you the result.

At the commencement of this work your Committees saw around them nothing but ruins, accumulated from every point. Terror and imprudence had destroyed every thing.: wisdom and good faith may still repair every thing there is not a moment to lose.

In probing the depth of the present wound, in observing from decade to decade the rapid progress in the depreciation of assignats, your Committees have perceived how necessary it is to check the evil; without which the annual revenues of the republic continually diminishing, and the expenses of the war incessantly augmenting in an frightful ratio, the national power would in fact have been paralyzed in the midst of its victories.

[To be continued.]