official prices a certain
amount of bread or sugar or soap or wood or coal to cover immediate
necessities. [50]

But it was found that the _Maximum_, with its divinely revealed four
rules, could not be made to work well--even by the shrewdest devices. In
the greater part of France it could not be enforced. As to merchandise
of foreign origin or merchandise into which any foreign product entered,
the war had raised it far above the price allowed under the first rule,
namely, the price of 1790, with an addition of one-third. Shopkeepers
therefore could not sell such goods without ruin. The result was that
very many went out of business and the remainder forced buyers to pay
enormous charges under the very natural excuse that the seller risked
his life in trading at all. That this excuse was valid is easily seen
by the daily lists of those condemned to the guillotine, in which
not infrequently figure the names of men charged with violating the
_Maximum_ laws. Manufactures were very generally crippled and frequently
destroyed, and agriculture was fearfully depressed. To detect goods
concealed by farmers and shopkeepers, a spy system was established
with a reward to the informer of one-third of the value of the goods
discovered. To spread terror, the Criminal Tribunal at Strassburg was
ordered to destroy the dwelling of any one found guilty of selling goods
above the price set by law. The farmer often found that he could not
raise his products at anything like the price required by the new law,
and when he tried to hold back his crops or cattle, alleging that he
could not afford to sell them at the prices fixed by law, they were
frequently taken from him by force and he was fortunate if paid even
in the depreciated fiat money--fortunate, indeed, if he finally escaped
with his life. [51]

Involved in all these perplexities, the Convention tried to cut the
Gordian knot. It decreed that any person selling gold or silver coin,
or making any difference in any transaction between paper and specie,
should be imprisoned in irons for six years:--that any one who refused
to accept a payment in _assignats_, or accepted _assignats_ at a
discount, should pay a fine of three thousand _francs_; and that any one
committing this crime a second time should pay a fine of six thousand
_francs_ and suffer imprisonment twenty years in irons. Later, on the
8th of September, 1793, the penalty for such offences was made death,
with confiscation of