Paper money has been issued, for the most part, on the one or the other of two conditions, namely: as irredeemable, when it has been made to rest on the vague obligation of some government to pay it some time or other in property; or as convertible into gold and silver on demand. But under both conditions it seems to have been impossible to preserve it from excess and consequent depreciation. Nothing would appear to be safer and sounder, on the face of it, than a money-obligation backed by all the responsibility and property of a government; and yet we do not recall a single instance in which an irredeemable government-money has been issued, where it did not sooner or later swamp the government beyond all hope of its redemption. No virtue of statesmanship is proof against the temptation of creating money at will. Even where there has been a nominal convertibility on demand of the bills of government banks, they have worked badly in practice. In 1637, for instance, the monarch of Sweden established the Bank of Stockholm; yet in a little while its issues amounted to forty-eight millions of roubles, and their depreciation to ninety-six per cent. In 1736, Denmark created the Bank of Copenhagen; but within nine years from its foundation it suspended redemptions altogether, and its notes were depreciated forty-six per cent. We need not refer to the extraordinary issues of French _assignats_, or of American continental money,--nor to the deluges of paper which have fallen upon Russia and Austria. During all these experiments, the sufferings of the people, according to the different historians, were absolutely appalling. One of these experiments of paper money, however, begun under the most promising auspices, and on a professed basis of convertibility, was yet so stupendous and awful in its effects, that it has taken its place as a Pharos in History, and is never to be forgotten. We refer, of course, to the banking prodigalities of the Regency of France, undertaken in connection with the scheme known as Law's Mississippi Bubble,--although the Bank and the Bubble were not essentially connected. We presume that our readers are acquainted with the incidents, because all the modern historians have described them, and because the more philosophical impute to them an active agency in the origination of that moral corruption and lack of political principle which hastened the advent of the great Revolution. Louis XIV. having left behind him, as the price of his glory, a debt of about a thousand millions of dollars, the French ministry, with a view to reduce it, ordered a re-coinage of the louis-d'or. An edict was promulgated, calling in the coin at sixteen livres, to be issued again at twenty; but Law, an acute and enterprising Scotchman, suggested that the end might be more happily accomplished by a project for a bank, which he carried in his pocket. He proposed to buy up the old coin at a higher rate than the mint allowed, and to pay for it in bank-notes. This project was so successful that the Regent took it into his own hands, and then began an issue of bills which literally intoxicated the whole of France. No scenes of stock-jobbing, of gambling, of frenzied speculation, of reckless excitement and licentiousness ever surpassed the scenes daily enacted in the Rue Quincampoix; and when the bubble burst, the distress was universal, heartrending, and frightful. With millions in their pockets, says a contemporary memoir, many did not know where to get a dinner; complaints and imprecations resounded on every side; some, utterly ruined, killed themselves in despair; and mysterious rumors of popular risings spread throughout Paris the terror of another expected St. Bartholomew.