individuals for the past three centuries. How many years of labor
are requisite to bring together again so much available capital, to
reconstruct in France and to refill once again those private reservoirs
which are to contain the accumulated savings essential for the out-flow
required to drive the great wheel of each general enterprise? Take into
account, moreover, the enterprises which are directly destroyed,
root and branch, by revolutionary executions, enforced against the
manufacturers and traders of Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux, proscribed
in a mass,[4234] guillotined, imprisoned, or put to flight, their
factories stopped, their storehouses put under sequestration, with their
stocks of brandy, soap, silk, muslins, leather, paper, serges, cloth,
canvas, cordage and the rest; the same at Nantes under Carrier, at
Strasbourg under Saint-Just, and everywhere else.[4235]--"Commerce
is annihilated," writes a Swiss merchant,[4236] from Paris, and the
government, one would say, tries systematically to render it impossible.
On the 27th of June, 1793, the Convention closes the Bourse; on the 15th
of April, 1794, it suppresses "financial associations" and "prohibits
all bankers, merchants and other persons from organizing any
establishment of the said character under any pretext or title
whatsoever." On the 8th of September, 1793, the Commune places seals
"in all the counting-houses of bankers, stockbrokers, agents and
silver-dealers,"[4237] and locks up their owners; as a favor,
considering that they are obliged to pay the drafts drawn on them, they
are let out, but provisionally, and on condition that they remain under
arrest at home, "under the guard of two good citizens," at their own
expense. Such is the case in Paris and in other cities, not alone with
prominent merchants, but likewise with notaries and lawyers, with whom
funds are on deposit and who manage estates; a sans-culotte with his
pike stands in their cabinet whilst they write, and he accompanies them
in the street when they call on their clients. Imagine the state of
a notary's office or a counting-room under a system of this sort! The
master of it winds up his business as soon as he can, no matter how,
makes no new engagements and does as little as possible. Still
more inactive than he, his colleagues, condemned to an indefinite
listlessness, under lock and key in the common prison, no longer attend
to their business.--There is a general, total paralysis of t