Note 54 — Front matter (continued 2)

"The notion that our maladies were incapable of remedy, and that no human mind could cure them, added keenly to the general grief. We saw ourselves plunged into a gulf of debts and public engagements, the interest alone of which absorbed the third part of the revenue, and which, far from being put into a course of liquidation, were continually accumulating by loans and anticipations."—History of the French Revolution, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, vol. i., p. 19.