der; for here, too, the
outrages of the Revolution had been too great. There had been too
much spoliation, too many imprisonments, exiles, and murders, too many
violations of every kind, too many invasions of the rights of property
and of persons, public and private. It was so much more difficult

* To insure respect for persons and all private and public possessions;

* to restrain at once both Royalists and Jacobins;

* to restore 140,000 emigres to their country and yet satisfy 1,200,000
possessors of national property;

* to give back to 25,000,000 of orthodox Catholics the right, faculty,
and means for worshipping, and yet not allow the schismatic clergy to be
maltreated;

* to bring face to face in the same commune the dispossessed seigneur
and the peasant holders of his domain;

* to compel the delegates of the Committee of Public Safety and their
victims, the shooters and the shot of Vendemiaire, the Fructidorians and
the Fructidorized, the Whites and the Blues of La Vendee and Brittany,
to live in peace side by side,

because the future laborers in this immense work, from the village
mayor to the state-senator and state-councilor, had borne a part in
the Revolution, either in effecting it or under subjection to
it--Monarchists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Montagnards, Thermidorians,
moderate Jacobins or desperate Jacobins, all oppressed in turn and
disappointed in their calculations. Their passions, under this regime,
had become embittered; each brought personal bias and resentment into
the performance of his duties; to prevent him from being unjust and
mischievous demanded a tightened curb.[2103] All sense of conviction,
under this regime, had died out; no body would serve gratis as in
1789;[2104] nobody would work without pay; disinterestedness had lost
all charm; ostentatious zeal seemed hypocrisy; genuine zeal seemed
self-dupery; each looked out for himself and not for the community;
public spirit had yielded to indifference, to egotism, and to the need
of security, of enjoyment, and of self-advancement. Human materials,
deteriorated by the Revolution, were less than ever suited to providing
citizens--they simply furnished functionaries. With such wheels combined
together according to formula current between 1791 and 1795, the
requisite work could not possibly be done. As a consequence, definitely
and for a long time, any use of the two great liberal mechanisms were
doomed. So long as the wheels rema