This penury only exists, say the Jacobins, because the laws against monopoly, and sales above the "maximum" prices are not being obeyed to the letter of the law. The egoism of the cultivator and the cupidity of dealers are not restrained by fear and delinquents escape too frequently from the legal penalty. Let us enforce this penalty rigorously; let us increase the punishment against them and their instruments; let us screw up the machine and give them a new wrench. A new estimate and verification of the food supply takes place, domiciliary searches, seizures of special stores regarded as too ample,4283 limited rations for each consumer, a common and obligatory mess table for all prisoners, brown, ÉgalitÉ bread, mostly of bran, for every mouth that can chew, prohibition of the making of any other kind, confiscation of boulters and sieves,4284 the "individual," personal responsibility of every administrator who allows the people he directs to resist or escape providing the demanded supplies, the sequestration of his property, imprisonment, fines, the pillory and the guillotine to hurry up requisitions, or stop free trading,—every terrifying method is driven to the utmost against the farmers and cultivators of the soil.

After April, 1794,4285 crowds of this class are found filling the prisons to overflowing; the Revolution has struck them also. They stroll about in the court yard, and wander through the corridors with a sad, stupefied expression, no longer comprehending the way things are going on in the world. In vain are efforts made to explain to them that "their crops are national property and that they are simply its depositaries;"4286 never had this new principle entered into, nor will it enter, their rude brains; always, through habit and instinct, will they work against it.—Let them be spared the temptation. Let us (the Jacobins) relieve them from, and, in fact, take their crops; let the State in France become the sole depositary and distributor of grain; let it solely buy and sell grain at a fixed rate. Consequently, at Paris,4287 the Committee of Public Safety first puts "in requisition all the oats that can be found in the Republic; every holder of oats is required to deposit his stock on hand within eight days, in the storehouse indicated by the district administration "at the maximum" price; otherwise he is "a 'suspect' and must be punished as such." In the meantime, through still more comprehensive orders issued in the provinces, Paganel in the department of Tarn, and Dartigoyte in those of Gers and the Upper-Garonne,4288 enjoin each commune to establish public granaries. "All citizens are ordered to bring in whatever produce they possess in grain, flour, wheat, maslin, rye, barley, oats, millet, buckwheat" at the "maximum" rate. Nobody shall keep on hand more than one month's supply, fifty pounds of flour or wheat for each person; in this way, the State, which holds in its hands the keys of the storehouses, may "carry out the salutary equalization of provisions" between department and department, district and district, commune and commune, individual and individual. A storekeeper will look after each of these well filled granaries; the municipality will itself deliver rations and, moreover, "take suitable steps to see that beans and vegetables, as they mature, be economically distributed under its supervision," at so much per head, and always at the rate of the "maximum." Otherwise, dismissal, imprisonment and prosecution "in the extraordinary criminal tribunal. "-This being accomplished, and the fruits of labor duly allotted, there remains only the allotment of labor itself. To effect this, Maignet,4289 in Vaucluse, and in the Bouches du RhÔne, prescribes for each municipality the immediate formation of two lists, one of day laborers and the other of proprietors. "All proprietors in need of a cultivator by the day," are to appear and ask for one at the municipality, which will assign the applicant as many as he wants, "in order on the list," with a card for himself and numbers for the designated parties. The laborer who does not enter his name on the list, or who exacts more than the "maximum" wages, is to be sentenced to the pillory with two years in irons. The same sentence with the addition of a fine of three hundred livres, is for every proprietor who employs any laborer not on the list or who pays more than the "maximum rate of wages.

After this, nothing more is necessary, in practice, than to

* draw up and keep in sight the new registries of names and figures made by the members of thirty thousand municipal boards, who cannot keep accounts and who scarcely know how to read and write;

* build a vast public granary, or put in requisition three or four barns in each commune, in which half dried and mixed grain may rot;

* pay two hundred thousand incorruptible storekeepers and measurers who will not divert anything from the depots for their friends or themselves;

* add to the thirty five thousand employees of the Committee on Provisions,4290 five hundred thousand municipal scribes disposed to quit their trades or ploughs for the purpose of making daily distributions gratuitously; but more precisely, to maintain four or five millions of perfect gendarmes, one in each family, living with it, to help along the purchases, sales and transactions of each day and to verify at night the contents of the locker.

In short, to set one half of the French people as spies on the other half.—These are the conditions which secure the production and distribution of food, and which suffice for the institution throughout France of a conscription of labor and the captivity of grain.

Unfortunately, the peasant does not understand this theory, but he understands business; he makes close calculations, and the positive, patent, vulgar facts on which he reasons lead to other conclusions:4291

"In Messidor last they took all my last years' oats, at fourteen francs in assignats, and, in Thermidor, they are going to take all this year's oats, at eleven francs in assignats. At this rate I shall not sow at all. Besides, I do not need any for myself, as they have taken my horses for the army wagons. To raise rye and wheat, as much of it as formerly, is also working at a loss; I will raise no more than the little I want for myself, and again, I suppose that this will be put in requisition, even my supplies for the year! I had rather let my fields lie fallow. Just see now, they are taking all the live three months' pigs! Luckily, I killed mine be forehand and it is now in the pork barrel. But they are going to claim all salt provisions like the rest. The new grabbers are worse than the old ones. Six months more, and we shall all die of hunger. It is better to cross one's arms at once and go to prison; there, at least, we shall be fed and not have to work."

In effect, they allow themselves to be imprisoned, the best of the small cultivators and proprietors by thousands, and Lindet,4292 at the head of the Commission on Provisions, speaks with dismay of the ground being no longer tilled, of cattle in France being no more abundant than the year before, and of nothing to be had to cut this year.

For a strange thing has happened, unheard of in Europe, almost incredible to any one familiar with the French peasant and his love of work. This field which he has ploughed, manured, harrowed and reaped with his own hands, its precious crop, the crop that belongs to him and on which he has feasted his eyes for seven months, now that it is ripe, he will not take the trouble to gather it; it would be bothering himself for some one else. As the crop that he sees there is for the government, let the government defray the final cost of getting it in; let it do the harvesting, the reaping, the putting it in sheaves, the carting and the thrashing in the barn.—Thereupon, the representatives on mission exclaim, each shouting in a louder or lower key, according to his character.

"Many of the cultivators," writes Dartigoyte,4293 "affect a supreme indifference for this splendid crop. One must have seen it, as I have, to believe how great the neglect of the wheat is in certain parts, how it is smothered by the grass.... Draft, if the case requires it, a certain number of inhabitants in this or that commune to work in another one.... Every man who refuses to work, except on the 'decade' day, must be punished as an ill-disposed citizen, as a royalist."—

"Generous friends of nature," writes Ferry,4294 introduce amongst you, perpetuate around you, the habit of working in common and begin with the present crop. Do not spare either indolent women or indolent men, those social parasites, many of whom you doubtless have in your midst. What! allow lazy men and lazy women where we are! Where should we find a Republican police?... Immediately on the reception of this present order the municipal officers of each commune will convoke all citoyennes in the Temple of the Eternal and urge them, in the name of the law, to devote themselves to the labors of harvesting. Those women who fail in this patriotic duty, shall be excluded from the assemblies, from the national festivals, while all good citoyennes are requested to repel them from their homes. All good citizens are requested to give to this rural festivity that sentimental character which befits it."

—And the programme is carried out, here in idyllic shape and there under compulsion. Around Avignon,4295 the commanding officer, the battalions of volunteers, and patriotic ladies, "the wives and daughters of patriots," inscribe themselves as harvesters. Around Arles, "the municipality drafts all the inhabitants; patrols are sent into the country to compel all who are engaged on other work to leave it and do the harvesting." The Convention, on its side, orders4296 the release, "provisionally, of all ploughmen, day-laborers, reapers, and professional artisans and brewers, in the country and in the market towns and communes, the population of which is not over twelve hundred inhabitants, and who are confined as 'suspects.' "—In other terms, physical necessity has imposed silence on the inept theory; above all things, the crop must be harvested, and indispensable arms be restored to the field of labor. The governors of France are compelled to put on the brake, if only for an instant, at the last moment, at sight of the yawning abyss, of approaching and actual famine; France was then gliding into it, and, if not engulfed, it is simply a miracle.

Four fortunate circumstances, at the last hour, concur to keep her suspended on the hither brink of the precipice.—The winter chances to be exceptionally mild.4297 The vegetables which make up for the absence of bread and meat provide food for April and May, while the remarkably fine harvest, almost spontaneous, is three weeks in advance.—Another, and the second piece of good fortune, consists in the great convoy from America, one hundred and sixteen vessels loaded with grain, which reached Brest on the 8th of June, 1794, in spite of English cruisers, thanks to the sacrifice of the fleet that protected it and which, eight days previously, had succumbed in its behalf. The third stroke of fortune is the entry of a victorious army into the enemies country and feeding itself through foreign requisitions, in Belgium, in the Palatinate and on the frontier provinces of Italy and Spain.—Finally, most fortunate of all, Robespierre, Saint Just and Couthon, the Paris commune and the theorist Jacobins, are guillotined on the 23rd of July, and with them falls despotic socialism. Henceforth, the Jacobin edifice crumbles, owing to great crevices in its walls. The "maximum," in fact, is no longer maintained, while the Convention, at the end of December, 1794, legally abolishes it. The farmers now sell as they please and at two prices, according as they are paid in assignats or coin; their hope, confidence and courage are restored; in October and November, 1794, they voluntarily do their own plowing and planting, and still more gladly will they gather in their own crops in July, 1795. Nevertheless, we can judge by the discouragement into which they had been plunged by four months of the system, the utter prostration into which they would have fallen had the system lasted an indefinite time. It is very probable that cultivation at the end of one or two years would have proved unproductive or have ceased altogether. Already, subject to every sort of exhortation and threat, the peasant had remained inert, apparently deaf and insensible, like an overloaded beast of burden which, so often struck, grows obstinate or sinks down and refuses to move. It is evident that he would have never stirred again could Saint-Just, holding him by the throat, have bound him hand and foot, as he had done at Strasbourg, in the multiplied knots of his Spartan Utopia. We should have seen what labor and the stagnation it produces comes to, when managed through State maneuvers by administrative manikins and humanitarian automatons. This experiment had been tried in China, in the eleventh century, and according to principles, long and regularly, by a well manipulated and omnipotent State, on the most industrious and soberest people in the world, and men died in myriads like flies. If the French, at the end of 1794 and during the following years did not die like flies, it was because the Jacobin system was relaxed too soon.4298