The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, vol. 2 - Online Library of ...

Online Library of Liberty: The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, vol. 2
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CHAPTER XXXIV.
Morris passes the winter of 1796 in London. News of the armistice on the Rhine.
Letter to Washington. Chosen honorary member of the Highland Society. Dines with
the Duke of Argyll. The King’s drawing-room. Goes to the House of Commons. The
Princess of Wales, Mr. Adams. Pitt speaks in the House of Commons. Fox. Sheridan.
Letter to Washington. Letter to Alexander Hamilton. Mrs. Montague’s drawing-room.
The Queen’s drawing-room. French victory in Italy. View of St. Paul’s. Dines with
Pitt at Lord Gower’s. The House of Lords. Dines with Mrs. Vassal.
The winter of 1796 Morris passed in London, watching the progress of events on the
Continent, and enjoying the society of his many friends among the émigrés. The
hospitality of numbers of English friends and acquaintances was always
acknowledged in his diary, which daily records an opera-party, a dinner, or a supper.
Foreign affairs naturally commanded the larger share of his attention, and rumors
concerning the movements of the armies, as well as facts, are to be found in the pages
of the diary. “There is nothing new,” says the entry for January 8th, “but I find the
people in the City are getting off their high but false opinion of the French plan of
finance. The gazette (the London Times? ) announces an armistice between the French
and Austrians on the Rhine, the account of which reached town at one o’clock, by
way of Paris, to-day.”
“Some mails are arrived from Hamburg [January 11th]. The news of the armistice on
the Rhine stand confirmed, but no particulars are, it would seem, contained in the
letters received.”
À propos of the measures taken in France to establish their finances, Morris wrote to
Washington on the 11th of January:
“These measures may perhaps be announced in America as the perfection of human
wisdom, but also as inevitably productive of the best effects; in which respect they
would differ from those perfections of wisdom heretofore exhibited on that theatre.
Our experience in America could have proved (had proof been necessary) that the
natural effect of paper money is to consume all the personal property of a country.
The assignats were going on in their natural progression, when, after the revolution of
the 10th of August, measures of increasing cruelty were successively adopted to force
property out of the hands of its owners, or at least to render the possession of it highly
dangerous. At the same time the total suspension of foreign commerce shut up all
remaining commodities within the country, and the permission to export was only
granted in exchange for articles wanted by the government, which gave its paper for
those things which it obliged the owner to sell, and which all but its agents were
prohibited from buying, by the very same means which compelled the sale. Mankind
were pretty generally the dupes of these appearances, and although they were going
on to increase the nominal amount of their paper to more than the fee simple of the
whole country was worth, people whose habits and profession should have taught
them better persisted in the absurd idea that all that mass of paper would be paid
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