used.

[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.

[Sidenote: Gentlemen are fugitives.]

But that place being the chief seat of the power and intelligence of the
ruling factio