e 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.

Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision _in a moment
under the guillotine_, and before the arrival of these
commissioners,--Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in
its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a
sort of miracle: and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets
had not been at the door, to give them not only strong, but prompt and
immediate succor, especially as neither this nor any other seaport town
in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions,
manners, and connections among the lower sort of people in those places.
This I take to be the true state of things in France, _so far as it
regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association,
capable of acting or of treating in corps_.

As to the oppressed _individuals_, they are many, and as discontented as
men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts
with which they are crushed. They want no stimulus to throw off this
dreadful yoke; but they do want, not manifestoes, which they have had
even to surfeit, but real protection, force, and succor.

The disputes and questions of men at their ease do not at all affect
their minds, or ever can occupy the minds of men in their situation.
These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have
done their mischief. The question is not between the rabble of systems,
Fayettism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism, or Federali