e man able
to answer for another man[5416]." Utter and irremediable disorder is
at hand. The Utopia of the theorists has been accomplished, the savage
condition has recommenced. Individuals now stand in by themselves;
everyone reverting back to his original feebleness, while his
possessions and his life are at the mercy of the first band that comes
along. He has nothing within him to control him but the sheep-like
habit of being led, of awaiting an impulsion, of turning towards the
accustomed center, towards Paris, from which his orders have always
arrived. Arthur Young[5417] is struck with this mechanical movement.
Political ignorance and docility are everywhere complete. He, a
foreigner, conveys the news of Alsace into Burgundy: the insurrection
there had been terrible, the populace having sacked the city-hall at
Strasbourg, of which not a word was known at Dijon; "yet it is nine days
since it happened; had it been nineteen I question if they would more
than have received the intelligence." There are no newspapers in the
cafes; no local centers of information, of resolution, of action. The
province submits to events at the capital; "people dare not move;
they dare not even form an opinion before Paris speaks."--This is what
Monarchical centralization leads to. It has deprived the groups of their
cohesion and the individual of his motivational drive. Only human dust
remains, and this, whirling about and gathered together in massive
force, is blindly driven along by the wind.[5418]

III.

Direction of the current.--The people led by lawyers.--
Theories and piques the sole surviving forces.--Suicide of
the Ancient regime.

We are all well aware from which side the gale comes, and, to assure
ourselves, we have merely to see how the reports of the Third-Estate are
made up. The peasant is led by the man of the law, the petty attorney
of the rural districts, the envious advocate and theorist. This one
insists, in the report, on a statement being made in writing and at
length of his local and personal grievances, his protest against taxes
and deductions, his request to have his dog free of the clog, and his
desire to own a gun to use against the wolves[5419]. Another one, who
suggests and directs, envelopes all this in the language of the Rights
of Man and that of the circular of Sieyes.

"For two months," writes a commandant in the South,[5420] "inferior
judges and lawyers, with which both town and