This supply of recruits to the corps of the highest civil ambition goes on with a regular progression.  In very few years it must amount to many thousands.  These, however, will be as nothing in comparison to the multitude of municipal officers, and officers of district and department, of all sorts, who have tasted of power and profit, and who hunger for the periodical return of the meal.  To these needy agitators, the glory of the state, the general wealth and prosperity of the nation, and the rise or fall of public credit are as dreams; nor have arguments deduced from these topics any sort of weight with them.  The indifference with which the Assembly regards the state of their colonies, the only valuable part of the French commerce, is a full proof how little they are likely to be affected by anything but the selfish game of their own ambition, now universally diffused.

[Sidenote:  Impracticability of resistance.]

It is true, amidst all these turbulent means of security to their system, very great discontents everywhere prevail.  But they only produce misery to those who nurse them at home, or exile, beggary, and in the end confiscation, to those who are so impatient as to remove from them.  Each municipal republic has a Committee, or something in the nature of a Committee of Research.  In these petty republics the tyranny is so near its object that it becomes instantly acquainted with every act of every man.  It stifles conspiracy in its very first movements.  Their power is absolute and uncontrollable.  No stand can be made against it.  These republics are besides so disconnected, that very little intelligence of what happens in them is to be obtained beyond their own bounds, except by the means of their clubs, who keep up a constant correspondence, and who give what color they please to such facts as they choose to communicate out of the track of their correspondence.  They all have some sort of communication, just as much or as little as they please, with the centre.  By this confinement of all communication to the ruling faction, any combination, grounded on the abuses and discontents in one, scarcely can reach the other.  There is not one man, in any one place, to head them.  The old government had so much abstracted the nobility from the cultivation of provincial interest, that no man in France exists, whose power, credit, or consequence extends to two districts, or who is capable of uniting them in any design, even if any man could assemble ten men together without being sure of a speedy lodging in a prison.  One must not judge of the state of France by what has been observed elsewhere.  It does not in the least resemble any other country.  Analogical reasoning from history or from recent experience in other places is wholly delusive.

In my opinion, there never was seen so strong a government internally as that of the French municipalities.  If ever any rebellion can arise against the present system, it must begin, where the Revolution which gave birth to it did, at the capital.  Paris is the only place in which there is the least freedom of intercourse.  But even there, so many servants as any man has, so many spies and irreconcilable domestic enemies.