without an adequate cause; and that cause I do not think it difficult to discover.
By the vast debt of France a great monied interest had insensibly grown up, and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which pre|vailed in that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the mutual con|vertibility of land into money, and of money into land, had always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more general and more strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of landed property held by the crown, and by a maxim of the French law held unalienably, the vast estates of the ec|clesiastic corporations,—all these had kept the landed and monied interests more separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country.
The monied property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the people. They saw it connected with their distresses, and ag|gravating them. It was no less envied by the old landed interests, partly for the same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it eclipsed, by the splendour of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed pe|digrees and naked titles of several among the nobility. Even when the nobility, which re|presented the more permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage (which some|times was the case) with the other description, the wealth which saved the family from ruin,
