uld have decided for the magistrates against the clubs,
for the police against rioters, for the king against the mob. In one or
two years more it would have learned that a restoration of the executive
power was indispensable for securing the execution of the laws; that the
chief of police, with his hands tied, could not do his duty; that it was
undoubtedly wise to give him his orders, but that if he was to be of any
use against knaves and fools, his hands should first be set free.

V.--Effects of the war on the common people.

Its alarms and fury.--The second revolutionary outburst and
its characteristics.--Alliance of the Girondists with the
mob.--The red cap and pikes.--Universal substitution of
government by force for government by law.

Just the contrary with war; the aspect of things changes, and the
alternative is the other way. It is no longer a choice between order and
disorder, but between the new and the old regime, for, behind foreign
opponents on the frontier, there stand the emigres. The commotion is
terrible, especially amongst the lower classes which mainly bore the
whole weight of the old establishment; among the millions who live by
the sweat of their brow, artisans, small farmers, metayers, day-laborers
and soldiers, also the smugglers of salt and other articles, poachers,
vagabonds, beggars and half-beggars, who, taxed, plundered, and harshly
treated for centuries, have to endure, from father to son, poverty,
oppression and disdain. They know through their own experience the
difference between their late and their present condition. They have
only to fall back on personal knowledge to revive in their imaginations
the enormous royal, ecclesiastical, and seignorial taxes, the direct tax
of eighty-one per cent., the bailiffs in charge, the seizures and the
husbandry service, the inquisition of excise men, of inspectors of the
salt tax, wine tax (rats de cave) and game-keepers, the ravages of wild
birds and of pigeons, the extortions of the collector and his clerk, the
delay and partiality in obtaining justice, the rashness and brutality of
the police, the kicks and cuffs of the constabulary, the poor wretches
gathered like heaps of dirt and filth, the promiscuousness, the
over-crowding, the filth and the starvation of the prisons.[2377] They
have simply to open their eyes to see their immense deliverance; all
direct or indirect taxes for the past two years legally abolished or