t as people began to take refuge from their
persecutions amongst themselves, they have driven them from that last
asylum.

The state of France is perfectly simple. It consists of but two
descriptions,--the oppressors and the oppressed.

The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands,--all the
arms, all the revenues of the public, all the confiscations of
individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their
occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a
body of janizaries to overrule and awe property. The heads of these
wretches they never suffer to cool. They supply them with a food for
fury varied by the day,--besides the sensual state of intoxication, from
which they are rarely free. They have made the priests and people
formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil,
moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and
practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it
impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous
arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name
whatsoever.

The other description--_the oppressed_--are people of some property:
they are the small relics of the persecuted landed interest; they are
the burghers and the farmers. By the very circumstance of their being of
some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be
very considerable as _a number_. In cities the nature of their
occupations renders them domestic and feeble; in the country it
confines them to their farm for subsistence. The national guards are all
changed and reformed. Everything suspicious in the description of which
they were composed is rigorously disarmed. Committees, called of
vigilance and safety, are everywhere formed: a most severe and
scrutinizing inquisition, far more rigid than anything ever known or
imagined. Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their
liberty, and even to their lives. Numbers scarcely credible have been
executed, and their property confiscated. At Paris, and in most other
towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole,--which they cannot obtain
without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters. Multitudes of
all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned. I have reason to believe
that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty
thousand[33] actually in jail,--a large proportion of peopl