ints in churches, and arresting old
women whom they encounter without national cockades; or members of the
municipalities, now reduced to execute the offices of constables, and
whose chief functions are to hunt out suspected people, or make
domiciliary visits in quest of concealed eggs and butter. But, above
all, this democratic oratory is used by tailors, shoemakers, &c.* of the
Committees of Inspection, to whom the Representatives on mission have
delegated their unlimited powers, who arrest much on the principle of
Jack Cade, and with whom it is a crime to read and write, or to appear
decently dressed.

* For some months the departments were infested by people of this
description--corrupt, ignorant, and insolent. Their motives of
arrest were usually the hope of plunder, or the desire of
distressing those whom they had been used to look upon as their
superiors.--At Arras it sufficed even to have disobliged the wives
of these miscreants to become the object of persecution. In some
places they arrested with the most barbarous caprice, even without
the shadow of a reason. At Hesden, a small town in Artois, Dumont
left the Mayor carte blanche, and in one night two hundred people
were thrown into prison. Every where these low and obscure
dominators reigned without controul, and so much were the people
intimidated, that instead of daring to complain, they treated their
new tyrants with the most servile adulation.--I have seen a
ci-devant Comtesse coquetting with all her might a Jacobin tailor,
and the richest merchants of a town soliciting very humbly the good
offices of a dealer in old clothes.

These ridiculous accoutrements, and this magnificent phraseology, are in
themselves very harmless; but the ascendancy which such a class of people
are taking has become a subject of just alarm.--The whole administration
of the country is now in the hands of uninformed and necessitous
profligates, swindlers, men already condemned by the laws, and who, if
the revolution had not given them "place and office," would have been at
the galleys, or in prison.*

* One of the administrators of the department de la Somme (which,
however, was more decently composed than many others,) was, before
the revolution, convicted of house-breaking, and another of forgery;
and it has since been proved on various occasions, particularly on
the