id they listen to? None.
What witnesses did they question? None. What deliberation did they enter
upon? None. What public did they call in? None. Thus, no public, no
deliberation, no counsellors, no witnesses, judges who are not
magistrates, a jury where none are sworn in, a tribunal which is not a
tribunal, imaginary offences, invented penalties, the accused absent,
the law absent; from all these things which resembled a dream there came
forth a reality: the condemnation of the innocent.

Exile, banishment, transportation, ruin, home-sickness, death, and
despair for 40,000 families.

That is what History calls the Mixed Commissions.

Ordinarily the great crimes of State strike the great heads, and content
themselves with this destruction; they roll like blocks of stone, all in
one piece, and break the great resistances; illustrious victims suffice
for them. But the Second of December had its refinements of cruelty; it
required in addition petty victims. Its appetite for extermination
extended to the poor and to the obscure, its anger and animosity
penetrated as far as the lowest class; it created fissures in the social
subsoil in order to diffuse the proscription there; the local
triumvirates, nicknamed "mixed mixtures," served it for that. Not one
head escaped, however humble and puny. They found means to impoverish
the indigent, to ruin those dying of hunger, to spoil the disinherited;
the _coup d'etat_ achieved this wonderful feat of adding misfortune to
misery. Bonaparte, it seems, took the trouble to hate a mere peasant;
the vine-dresser was torn from his vine, the laborer from his furrow,
the mason from his scaffold, the weaver from his loom. Men accepted this
mission of causing the immense public calamity to fall, morsel by
morsel, upon the humblest walks of life. Detestable task! To crumble a
catastrophe upon the little and on the weak.

CHAPTER XIV.

A RELIGIOUS INCIDENT

A little religion can be mingled with this justice. Here is an example.

Frederick Morin, like Arnauld de l'Ariege, was a Catholic Republican. He
thought that the souls of the victims of the 4th of December, suddenly
cast by the volleys of the _coup d'etat_ into the infinite and the
unknown, might need some assistance, and he undertook the laborious task
of having a mass said for the repose of these souls. But the priests
wished to keep the masses for their friends. The group of Catholic
Republicans which Frederick Morin heade