ing it were wanting
in him. He had not the force which a power above communicates to its
delegates below; nobody saw behind him the government and the army; his
only resource was a national-guard, which either shirked or refused to
do its duty, and which often did not exist at all.--On the contrary, he
could prevaricate, pillage, and persecute for his own advantage and
that of his clique with impunity; for there was no restraint on him from
above; the Paris Jacobins would not be disposed to alienate the Jacobins
of the province; they were partisans and allies, and the government
had few others; it was bound to retain them, to let them intrigue and
embezzle at will.

Suppose an extensive domain of which the steward is appointed, not by
the absent owner, but by his tenants, debtors, farmers, and dependents:
the reader may imagine whether rents will be paid and debts collected,
whether road-taxes will be worked out, what care will be taken of the
property, what its annual income will be to the owner, how abuses of
commission and omission will be multiplied indefinitely, how great the
disorder will be, the neglect, the waste, the fraud, the injustice, and
the license.--The same in France,[2106] and for the same reason:

* every public service disorganized, destroyed, or perverted;

* no justice, no police;

* authorities abstaining from prosecution, magistrates not daring to
condemn, a gendarmerie which receives no orders or which stands still;

* rural marauding become a habit;

* roving bands of brigands in forty-five departments;

* mail wagons and coaches stopped and pillaged even up to the environs
of Paris;

* highways broken up and rendered impassable;

* open smuggling, customs yielding nothing, national forests devastated,
the public treasury empty,[2107] its revenues intercepted and expended
before being deposited, taxes decreed and not collected;

* everywhere arbitrary assessments of real and personal estate, no less
wicked exemptions than overcharges;

* in many places no list prepared for tax assessments,

* communes which here and there, under pretext of defending the republic
against neighboring consumers, exempt themselves from both tax and
conscription;

* conscripts to whom their mayor gives false certificates of infirmity
and marriage, who do not turn out when ordered out, who desert by
hundreds on the way to headquarters, who form mobs and use guns in
defending themselves against the tro