s at
the service of the new reign. And no dogma was better suited their to
authoritative instinct; no axiom furnished them so convenient a fulcrum
on which to set up and turn their logical wheel. This wheel, which they
had latterly managed with care and caution under the ancient Regime, had
suddenly in their hands turned with frightful speed and effect in order
to convert the rigid, universal, and applied laws, the intermittent
processes, the theoretical pretensions, and the worst precedents of the
monarchy into practice. This meant

* the use of extraordinary commissions,

* accusations of lese majeste,

* the suppression of legal formalities,

* the persecution of religious beliefs and of personal opinions,

* the right of condemning publications and of coercing thought,

* the right of instruction and education,

* the rights of pre-emption, of requisition, of confiscation, and of
proscription,

in short, pure and perfect arbitrariness. The result is visible in the
deeds of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambaceres, in
those of the Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention,
under the Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent
for combining despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their
professional skill in fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible
arguments with which to properly strangle the individual, their
adversary, to the profit of the State, their eternal master.

In effect, not only had they almost strangled their adversary, but
likewise, through an aftereffect, their master: France which, after
fourteen months of suffocation, was approaching physical suicide.[2319]
Such success, too great, had obliged them to stop; they had abandoned
one-half of their destructive creed, retaining only the other half, the
effect of which, less imminent, was less apparent. If they no longer
dared paralyze individual acts in the man, they persisted in paralyzing
in the individual all collective acts.--There must be no special
associations in general society; no corporations within the State,
especially no spontaneous bodies endowed with the initiative,
proprietary and permanent: such is Article II. of the Revolutionary
Creed, and the direct consequence of the previous one which posits
axiomatically the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the
State. Rousseau,[2320] inventor of the first, had like-wise enunciated
the second; the constitue