io Julia Crewitt Stoddard 



proportion of the crop demanded and there would have been no 

 real scarcity if Mr. Necker would have let the corn trade alone : 

 but his edicts of restrictions have operated to raise the price more 

 than all other causes together." 1 On the publication of Necker's 

 memoire, announcing that he had ordered the importation of 

 immense cargoes of wheat, 2 "the price rose in one week 30 per 

 cent." "I was personal witness," says Young, "of the effect of 

 this publication in many markets ; instead of sinking the price it 

 raised it directly and enormously." 3 



"Proclamations against exports, ordinances regulating sale, 

 laws against monopolizers or boasts of imports from abroad, all 

 these measures have the same tendency : they confirm . . . 

 the apprehension of want." 4 This fear of want was the greatest 

 aggravation to the social troubles, tending to produce the very 

 condition dreaded by its effect on the circulation of grain. It 

 is probably no exaggeration to say that "more persons died of 

 famine in consequence of these measures than all the corn pro- 

 duced by them would feed in a year." 5 



That the high prices tempted to speculation is without doubt. 

 The opportunity was too good to be neglected. Whether these 

 speculations were as enormous as contemporaries believed it 

 would be impossible to say. Notwithstanding the known integ- 

 rity of Bailly, the fact that he was a stanch patriot and mayor of 

 Paris, and that he had been the first president of the assembly, 

 the Paris committee of subsistence of which he was chairman 

 did not escape suspicion. Gouverneur Morris, out of patience 

 with Lafayette for delays in arranging for the food supply for 

 the army, casts aspersions on some members of this committee. 

 They have, he presumes, "been casting about for ways to make 

 money out of the present distress." 6 



Another deplorable effect of government interference was that 

 fry these measures of restriction on the grain trade, the trade 



1 Young, Travels in France, 104. 



9 Ibid., 476. 



s Ibid., 477. 



*Ibid., 476. 



6 Ibid., 479. 



6 Morris, Diary and Letters, I, 167. 



276 



