The convents also were preservers; one is struck with the number
of establishments and edifices which have been erected by bachelor
masters in their residence: all these peaceable sovereigns have
benefited their people. An archbishop of Salzburg in the last
century has cut a road which is prolonged for several hundred paces
under a mountain, like the grotto of Pausilippo at Naples: on the
front of the entrance gate there is a bust of the archbishop, under
which is an inscription: Tesaxa loquuntur. (The stones speak of
thee). There is a degree of grandeur in this inscription.
I entered at last into that Austria, which four years before I had
seen so happy; already I was struck by a sensible change, produced
by the depreciation of paper-money, and the variations of every kind
which the uncertainty of the financial measures had introduced into
its value. Nothing demoralizes a people so much as these continual
fluctuations which make every man a broker, and hold out to the
working classes a means of getting money by sharping, instead of by
their labour. I no longer found in the people the same probity which
had struck me four years before: this paper-money sets the
imagination at work with the hope of rapid and easy gains; and the
hazardous chances overturn the gradual and certain existence which
is the basis of the honesty of the middling classes.
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