and dealers in contraband salt.--Bandits.--Beggars and
vagabonds.--Advent of brigands.--The people of Paris.

Vagrants, recalcitrants of all kinds, fugitives of the law or the
police, beggars, cripples, foul, filthy, haggard and savage, they are
bred by the social injustice of the system, and around every one of
the social wounds these swarm like vermin.--Four hundred captaincies
protects vast quantities of game feeding on the crops under the eyes of
owners of the land, transforming these into thousands of poachers, the
more dangerous since they are armed, and defy the most terrible laws.
Already in 1752[5321] are seen around Paris "gatherings of fifty or
sixty, all fully armed and acting as if on regular foraging campaigns,
with the infantry at the center and the cavalry on the wings. . . . They
live in the forests where they have created a fortified and guarded area
and paying exactly for what they take to live on." In 1777[5322], at
Sens in Burgundy, the public attorney, M. Terray, hunting on his own
property with two officers, meets a gang of poachers who fire on the
game under their eyes, and soon afterwards fire on them. Terray is
wounded and one of the officers has his coat pierced; guards arrive, but
the poachers stand firm and repel them; dragoons are sent for and the
poachers kill of these, along with three horses, and are attacked
with sabers; four of them are brought to the ground and seven are
captured.-Reports of the States-General show that every year, in each
extensive forest, murders occur, sometimes at the hands of a poacher,
and again, and the most frequently, by the shot of a gamekeeper.--It is
a continuous warfare at home; every vast domain thus harbors its rebels,
provided with powder and ball and knowing how to use them.

Other recruits for rioting are found among smugglers and in dealers in
contraband salt[5323]. A tax, as soon as it becomes exorbitant, invites
fraud, and raises up a population of delinquents against its army of
clerks. The number of such defrauders may be seen when we consider the
number of custom officers: twelve hundred leagues of interior custom
districts are guarded by 50,000 men, of which 23,000 are soldiers in
civilian dress[5324]. "In the principal provinces of the salt-tax and
in the provinces of the five great tax leasing administrations (fermes),
for four leagues (ten miles) on either side of the prohibited line,"
cultivation is abandoned; everybody is either a cu