towns buy at a high price and sell at a low one.--Food
becomes dearer and famine begins.--Prices during the first
six months of 1793.

Such is the hardship in France at the moment when the Jacobin conquest
has been completed, a misery of which the Jacobins are the cause due to
the systematic war they have waged against property during the preceding
four years.

From below, they have provoked, excused, amnestied, or tolerated
and authorized all the popular attacks on property,[4203] countless
insurrections, seven successive jacqueries, some of them so extensive
as to cover eight or ten departments at the same time. The last one let
loose on all France a universal and lasting brigandage, the arbitrary
rule of paupers, vagabonds and ruffians; every species of robbery,
from a refusal to pay rents and leases to the sacking of chateaux and
ordinary domiciles, even to the pillage of markets and granaries. Free
scope was given to mobs which, under a political pretext, tax and ransom
the "suspects" of all classes at pleasure, not alone the noble and the
rich but the peaceable farmer and well-to-do artisan. In short, the
country reverted back to a natural state, the sovereignty of appetites,
greed and lust, to mankind's return to a savage, primitive life in
the forests. Only a short time before, in the month of February, 1793,
through Marat's recommendation, and with the connivance of the Jacobin
municipality, the Paris riff-raff had broken into twelve hundred
groceries and divided on the spot, either gratis or at the price it
fixed, sugar, soap, brandy and coffee.

From above, they had undertaken, carried out and multiplied the worst
assaults on property, vast spoliations of every sort; the suppression
of hundreds of millions of incomes and the confiscation of billions of
capital; the abolition without indemnity of tithes and quitrents; the
expropriation of the property of the clergy, of emigres, that of
the order of Malta, that of the pious, charitable and educational
associations and endowments, even laic; seizures of plate, of the sacred
vessels and precious ornaments of the churches. And, because they have
the power, others still more vast. After August 10, their newspapers in
Paris and their commissioners in the departments,[4204] have preached

"the agrarian law, the holding of all property in common, the leveling
of fortunes, the right of each fraction of the sovereign people" to help
itself by force to all