Obviously, if the people is not being fed properly and in places not at all, it is because one of the central and most important fibers of the economical machine has been incapacitated. It is evident that this fiber controls the sentiment by which man holds on to his property, fears to risk it, refuses to depreciate it, and tries to increase it.4228 Obviously in the real human being, such as he actually is made up, this intense sentiment, tenacious, always stirring and active, is the magazine of inward energy which provides for three-fourths, almost the whole, of that unremitting effort, that calculating attention, that determined perseverance which leads the individual to undergo privation, to contrive and to exert himself, to turn to profitable account the labor of his hands, brain and capital, and to produce, save and create for himself and for others various resources and comforts.

(It is probable that disinterested motives, pure love for one's neighbor, for humanity, for country, do not form a hundredth part of the total energy that produces human activity. It must not be forgotten that the actions of men are alloyed with motives of a lower order, such as love of fame, the desire of self-admiration and of self-approval, fear of punishment and hope of reward beyond the grave, all of these being interested motives, and without which disinterested motives would be inoperative excepting in two or three souls among ten thousand.4229)

Thus far, in society as a whole, this sentiment has been only partially touched, and the injury has mainly been to the well-to-do or rich classes. At first only one-half of its useful energy has been destroyed since only those services rendered by the rich and wealthy classes have been dispensed with. Little else than the labor of the capitalist, proprietor or contractor has been suppressed, whose far-reaching, combined, comprehensive labor, the rewards of which consist of objects of luxury and convenience, ensure for society that abundant supplies are always on hand, through ready and spontaneous distribution of indispensable commodities. There remains (for the Jacobins) to crush out what is left of this laborious and nutritive fiber; the remnant of useful energy has to be destroyed down to its extirpation among the people. Here there must be a suppression, as far as possible, of all manual, rude labor even on a small scale, and of its rudimentary fruits; the discouragement of the insignificant shopkeeper, mechanic and ploughman must be effected; the corner-grocer must be prevented from selling his sugar and candles, and the cobbler from mending shoes: the miller must think of giving up his mill and the wagoner of abandoning his cart; the farmer must be convinced that the best thing he can do is to get rid of his horses, eat his pork himself,4230 let his oxen famish and leave his crops to rot on the ground.—The Jacobins are to do all this, for it is the inevitable result of the theory that they have proclaimed and which they apply. According to this theory the stern, strong, deep-seated instinct through which the individual stubbornly holds on to what he has, to what he makes for himself and for those that belong to him, is just the unwholesome fiber that must be rooted out or paralyzed at any cost; its true name is "egoism, incivism," and its operations consist of outrages on the community, which is the sole legitimate proprietor of property and products, and, yet more, of all persons and services. Body and soul, all belongs to the State, nothing to individuals, and, if need be, the State has the right to take not only lands and capital, but, again, to claim and tax at whatever rate it pleases all corn and cattle, all vehicles and the animals that draw them, all candles and sugar; it has the right to appropriate to itself and tax at whatever rate it pleases, the labor of shoemaker, tailor, miller, wagoner, ploughman, reaper and thrasher. The seizure of men and things is universal, and the new sovereigns do their best at it; for, in practice, necessity urges them on; insurrection thunders at their door; their supporters, all crackbrains with empty stomachs, the poor and the idle, and the Parisian populace, listen to no reason and blindly insist on things haphazard; they are bound to satisfy their patrons at once, to issue one on top of the other all the decrees they call for, even when impracticable and mischievous to starve the provinces so as to feed the city, to starve the former to-morrow so as to feed the latter to-day.—Subject to the clamors and menaces of the street they dispatch things rapidly; they cease to care for the future, the present being all that concerns them; they take and take forcibly; they uphold violence by brutality, they support robbery with murder; they expropriate persons by categories and appropriate objects by categories, and after the rich they despoil the poor.—During fourteen months the revolutionary government thus keeps both hands at work, one hand completing the confiscation of property, large and medium, and the other proceeding to the entire abolition of property even on a small scale.

Against large or medium properties it suffices to extend and aggravate the decrees already passed.—The spoliation of the last of existing corporations must be effected: the government, confiscates the property of hospitals, communes, and all scientific or literary associations.4231

To this we must add the spoliation of State credits and all other credits: it issues in fourteen months 5 100 millions of assignats, at one time and with one decree 1,400 million and another time 2,000 millions. It thus condemns itself to complete future bankruptcy. It also calls in the 1,500 million of assignats bearing the royal stamp (À face royale) and thus arbitrarily converts and reduces the public debt on the Grand Ledger, which is already, in fact, a partial and declared bankruptcy. Six months imprisonment for whoever refuses to accept assignats at par, twenty years in irons if the offence is repeated and the guillotine if there is an incivique intention or act, which suffices for all other creditors.4232

The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich, requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only to exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person taxed,4233 and the resumption by the State of the public domain pledged to private individuals for the past three centuries. How many years of labor are requisite to bring together again so much available capital, to reconstruct in France and to refill once again those private reservoirs which are to contain the accumulated savings essential for the out-flow required to drive the great wheel of each general enterprise? Take into account, moreover, the enterprises which are directly destroyed, root and branch, by revolutionary executions, enforced against the manufacturers and traders of Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux, proscribed in a mass,4234 guillotined, imprisoned, or put to flight, their factories stopped, their storehouses put under sequestration, with their stocks of brandy, soap, silk, muslins, leather, paper, serges, cloth, canvas, cordage and the rest; the same at Nantes under Carrier, at Strasbourg under Saint-Just, and everywhere else.4235—"Commerce is annihilated," writes a Swiss merchant,4236 from Paris, and the government, one would say, tries systematically to render it impossible. On the 27th of June, 1793, the Convention closes the Bourse; on the 15th of April, 1794, it suppresses "financial associations" and "prohibits all bankers, merchants and other persons from organizing any establishment of the said character under any pretext or title whatsoever." On the 8th of September, 1793, the Commune places seals "in all the counting-houses of bankers, stockbrokers, agents and silver-dealers,"4237 and locks up their owners; as a favor, considering that they are obliged to pay the drafts drawn on them, they are let out, but provisionally, and on condition that they remain under arrest at home, "under the guard of two good citizens," at their own expense. Such is the case in Paris and in other cities, not alone with prominent merchants, but likewise with notaries and lawyers, with whom funds are on deposit and who manage estates; a sans-culotte with his pike stands in their cabinet whilst they write, and he accompanies them in the street when they call on their clients. Imagine the state of a notary's office or a counting-room under a system of this sort! The master of it winds up his business as soon as he can, no matter how, makes no new engagements and does as little as possible. Still more inactive than he, his colleagues, condemned to an indefinite listlessness, under lock and key in the common prison, no longer attend to their business.—There is a general, total paralysis of those natural organs which, in economic life, produce, elaborate, receive, store, preserve, exchange and transmit in large quantities; and as an after effect, embarrass, saturate, or weaken all the lesser subordinate organs to which the superior ones no longer provide outlets, intermediary agencies or aliment.

It is now the turn of the small enterprises. Whatever their sufferings may be they are ordered to carry their work out as in normal times, and they will be forced to do this. The Convention, pursuing its accustomed rigid logical course with its usual shortsightedness, lays on them its violent and inept hands; they are trodden down, trampled upon and mauled for the purpose of curing them. Farmers are forbidden to sell their produce except in the markets, and obliged to bring to these a quota of so many sacks per week, military raids compelling them to furnish their quotas.4238 Shopkeepers are ordered "to expose for sale, daily and publicly, all goods and provisions of prime necessity" that they have on hand, while a maximum price is established, above which no one shall sell "bread, flour and grain, vegetables and fruits, wine, vinegar, cider, beer and brandy, fresh meat, salt meat, pork, cattle, dried, salted, smoked or pickled fish, butter, honey, sugar, sweet-oil, lamp-oil, candles, firewood, charcoal and other coal, salt, soap, soda, potash, leather, iron, steel, castings, lead, brass, hemp, linen, woolens, canvas and woven stuffs, sabots, shoes and tobacco." Whoever keeps on hand more than he consumes is a monopolist and commits a capital crime; the penalty, very severe, is imprisonment or the pillory, for whoever sells above the established price:4239 such are the simple and direct expedients of the revolutionary government, and such is the character of its inventive faculty, like that of the savage who hews down a tree to get at its fruit.—Consequently, after the first application of the "maximum" the shopkeeper is no longer able to carry on business; his customers, attracted by the sudden depreciation in price of his wares, flock to his shop and empty it in a few days;4240 having sold his goods for half what they cost him,4241 he has got back only one-half of his advances; therefore, he can only one-half renew his assortment, less than a half, since he has not paid his bills, and his credit is declining, the (Jacobin) representatives on mission having taken all his coin, plate and assignats. Hence, during the following month, buyers find on his unfurnished counters nothing but rubbish and refuse.

In like manner, after the proclamation of the maximum,4242 the peasant refuses to bring his produce to market, while the revolutionary army is not everywhere on hand to take it from him by force: he leaves his crop unthrashed as long as he can, and complains of not finding the men to thrash it. If necessary, he hides it or feeds it out to his animals. He often barters it away for wood, for a side of bacon or in payment for a day's work. At night, he carts it off six leagues to a neighboring district, where the local maximum is fixed at a higher rate. He knows who, in his own vicinity, still has specie in his pocket and he underhandedly supplies him with his stores. He especially conceals his superabundance and, as formerly, pretends to be poor and suffering. He is on good terms with the village authorities, with the mayor and national agent who are as interested as he is in evading the law, and, on a bribe being necessary, he gives it. At last, he allows himself to be sued, and his property attached; he goes to prison and tires the authorities out with his obstinacy. Hence, from week to week, less flour and grain and fewer cattle come to market, while meat becomes scarcer at the butcher's, and bread at the baker's.—Having thus paralyzed the lesser organs of supply and demand the Jacobins now have only to paralyze labor itself, the skilled hands, the active and vigorous arms. This is simply done by replacing the independent private workshop by the compulsory national workshop in this way replacing piece-work by work by the day, and the attentive, energetic workman who minds his business and expects to earn money in return by inattentive apathic workmen pressed into a poorly paid service but paid even when they botch the job or laze about.—This is what the Jacobins do by forcibly commanding the services of all sorts of laborers,4243 "all who help handle, transport and retail produce and articles of prime necessity," "country people who usually get in the crops," and, more particularly, thrashers, reapers, carters, rafts men, and also shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths and the rest.—At every point of the social organism, the same principle is applied with the same result. Substitute everywhere an external, artificial and mechanical constraint for the inward, natural and animating stimulant, and you get nothing but an universal atrophy. Deprive people of the fruits of their labor, and yet more, force them to produce by fear, confiscate their time, their painstaking efforts and their persons, reduce them to the condition of fellahs, create in them the sentiments of fellahs, and you will have nothing but the labor and productions of fellahs, that is to say, a minimum of labor and production, and hence, insufficient supplies for sustaining a very dense population, which, multiplied through a superior and more productive civilization, will not long subsist under a barbarous, inferior and unproductive rÉgime. When this systematic and complete expropriation terminates we see the final result of the system, no longer a dearth, but famine, famine on a large scale, and the destruction of lives by millions.—Among the Jacobins,4244 some of the maddest who are clear-sighted, on account of their fury, Guffroy, Antonelle, Jean Bon Saint-AndrÉ, Collot d'Herbois, foresee the consequences and accept them along with the principle. Others, who avoid seeing it, are only the more determined in the application of it. However, they all work together with all their might to aggravate the misery of which the lamentable spectacle is so vainly exposed under their eyes.