t in this barbarous
manner.

It is impossible not to observe, that, in the spirit of this geometrical
distribution and arithmetical arrangement, these pretended citizens
treat France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors,
they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The
policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and
insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy
all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws,
and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; to produce a general
poverty; to put up their properties to auction; to crush their princes,
nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low everything which had lifted its head
above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their
distresses, the disbanded people, under the standard of old opinion.
They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends
to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other
nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union, under color of
providing for the independence of each of their cities.

When the members who compose these new bodies of cantons, communes, and
departments, arrangements purposely produced through the medium of
confusion, begin to act, they will find themselves in a great measure
strangers to one another. The electors and elected throughout,
especially in the rural _cantons_, will be frequently without any civil
habitudes or connections, or any of that natural discipline which is the
soul of a true republic. Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now
no longer acquainted with their districts, bishops with their dioceses,
or curates with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men
bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which
Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and
wiser days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were
careful to make the elements of a methodical subordination and
settlement to be coeval, and even to lay the foundations of discipline
in the military.[122] But when all the good arts had fallen into ruin,
they proceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men, and
with as little judgment, and as little care for those things which make
a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as well as almost every
instance, your new commonwealth is born and bred and fed in those