The state of France is perfectly simple.  It consists of but two descriptions,—­the oppressors and the oppressed.

The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands,—­all the arms, all the revenues of the public, all the confiscations of individuals and corporations.  They have taken the lower sort from their occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a body of janizaries to overrule and awe property.  The heads of these wretches they never suffer to cool.  They supply them with a food for fury varied by the day,—­besides the sensual state of intoxication, from which they are rarely free.  They have made the priests and people formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil, moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name whatsoever.

The other description—­the oppressed—­are people of some property:  they are the small relics of the persecuted landed interest; they are the burghers and the farmers.  By the very circumstance of their being of some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be very considerable as a number.  In cities the nature of their occupations renders them domestic and feeble; in the country it confines them to their farm for subsistence.  The national guards are all changed and reformed.  Everything suspicious in the description of which they were composed is rigorously disarmed.  Committees, called of vigilance and safety, are everywhere formed:  a most severe and scrutinizing inquisition, far more rigid than anything ever known or imagined.  Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their liberty, and even to their lives.  Numbers scarcely credible have been executed, and their property confiscated.  At Paris, and in most other towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole,—­which they cannot obtain without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters.  Multitudes of all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned.  I have reason to believe that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty thousand[33] actually in jail,—­a large proportion of people of property in any state.  If a father of a family should show any disposition to resist or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children are cruelly to answer for it.  It is by means of these hostages that they keep the troops, which they force by masses (as they call it) into the field, true to their colors.

Another of their resources is not to be forgotten.  They have lately found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme sovereign authority, which no monarch has been able yet to give to any representation of his.

The commissioners of the National Convention, who are the members of the Convention itself, and really exercise all its powers, make continual circuits through every province, and visits to every army.  There they supersede all the ordinary authorities, civil and military, and change and alter everything at their pleasure.  So that, in effect, no deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants.