them on; insurrection thunders at their door;
their supporters, all crackbrains with empty stomachs, the poor and the
idle, and the Parisian populace, listen to no reason and blindly insist
on things haphazard; they are bound to satisfy their patrons at once, to
issue one on top of the other all the decrees they call for, even when
impracticable and mischievous to starve the provinces so as to feed
the city, to starve the former to-morrow so as to feed the latter
to-day.--Subject to the clamors and menaces of the street they dispatch
things rapidly; they cease to care for the future, the present being all
that concerns them; they take and take forcibly; they uphold violence by
brutality, they support robbery with murder; they expropriate persons
by categories and appropriate objects by categories, and after the
rich they despoil the poor.--During fourteen months the revolutionary
government thus keeps both hands at work, one hand completing the
confiscation of property, large and medium, and the other proceeding to
the entire abolition of property even on a small scale.

Against large or medium properties it suffices to extend and aggravate
the decrees already passed.--The spoliation of the last of existing
corporations must be effected: the government, confiscates the
property of hospitals, communes, and all scientific or literary
associations.[4231]

To this we must add the spoliation of State credits and all other
credits: it issues in fourteen months 5 100 millions of assignats,
at one time and with one decree 1,400 million and another time 2,000
millions. It thus condemns itself to complete future bankruptcy. It also
calls in the 1,500 million of assignats bearing the royal stamp (a face
royale) and thus arbitrarily converts and reduces the public debt on
the Grand Ledger, which is already, in fact, a partial and declared
bankruptcy. Six months imprisonment for whoever refuses to accept
assignats at par, twenty years in irons if the offence is repeated and
the guillotine if there is an incivique intention or act, which suffices
for all other creditors.[4232]

The spoliation of individuals, a forced loan of a billion on the rich,
requisitions for coin against assignats at par, seizures of plate and
jewels in private houses, revolutionary taxes so numerous as not only to
exhaust the capital, but likewise the credit, of the person taxed,[4233]
and the resumption by the State of the public domain pledged to private