ops,--such were the fruits of the
system.

The government could not constrain rural majorities with the officials
chosen by the selfish and inept rural majorities. Neither could it
repress the urban minorities with agents elected by the same partial
and corrupt urban minorities. Hands are necessary, and hands as firm as
tenacious, to seize conscripts by the collar, to rummage the pockets
of taxpayers, and the State did not have such hands. They were required
right away, if only to prepare and provide for urgent needs. If the
western departments had to be subdued and tranquilized, relief furnished
to Massena besieged in Genoa, Melas prevented from invading Provence,
Moreau's army transported over the Rhine, the first thing was to restore
to the central government the appointment of local authorities.

V. Reasons for centralization.

Reasons for placing the executive central power in one
hand.--Sieyes' chimerical combinations.--Bonaparte's
objections.

On this second point, the evidence was scarcely less.--And clearly, the
moment the local powers owed their appointment to the central powers, it
is plain that the central executive power, on which they depend, should
be unique. For, this great team of functionaries, driven from aloft,
could not have aloft several distinct drivers; being several and
distinct, the drivers would each pull his own way, while the horses,
pulling in opposite directions, would do nothing but prance. In this
respect the combinations of Sieyes do not bear examination. A mere
theorist and charged with preparing the plan of a new constitution,
he had reasoned as if the drivers on the box were not men, but robots:
perched above all, a grand-elector, a show sovereign, with two places
to dispose of and always passive, except to appoint or revoke two active
sovereigns, the two governing consuls. One, a peace-consul, appointing
all civil officers, and the other a war-consul, making all military and
diplomatic appointments; each with his own ministers, his own council of
state, his own court of judicature. All these functionaries, ministers,
consuls, and the grand-elector himself, were revocable at the will of
a senate which from day to day could absorb them, that is to say,
make them senators with a salary of 30,000 francs and an embroidered
dress-coat.[2108] Sieyes evidently had not taken into account either the
work to be done or the men who would have to do it, while Bonaparte,