the applicant as many as
he wants, "in order on the list," with a card for himself and numbers
for the designated parties. The laborer who does not enter his name
on the list, or who exacts more than the "maximum" wages, is to be
sentenced to the pillory with two years in irons. The same sentence with
the addition of a fine of three hundred livres, is for every proprietor
who employs any laborer not on the list or who pays more than the
"maximum rate of wages.

After this, nothing more is necessary, in practice, than to

* draw up and keep in sight the new registries of names and figures
made by the members of thirty thousand municipal boards, who cannot keep
accounts and who scarcely know how to read and write;

* build a vast public granary, or put in requisition three or four barns
in each commune, in which half dried and mixed grain may rot;

* pay two hundred thousand incorruptible storekeepers and measurers
who will not divert anything from the depots for their friends or
themselves;

* add to the thirty five thousand employees of the Committee on
Provisions,[4290] five hundred thousand municipal scribes disposed
to quit their trades or ploughs for the purpose of making daily
distributions gratuitously; but more precisely, to maintain four or five
millions of perfect gendarmes, one in each family, living with it, to
help along the purchases, sales and transactions of each day and to
verify at night the contents of the locker.

In short, to set one half of the French people as spies on the other
half.--These are the conditions which secure the production and
distribution of food, and which suffice for the institution throughout
France of a conscription of labor and the captivity of grain.

Unfortunately, the peasant does not understand this theory, but he
understands business; he makes close calculations, and the
positive, patent, vulgar facts on which he reasons lead to other
conclusions:[4291]

"In Messidor last they took all my last years' oats, at fourteen francs
in assignats, and, in Thermidor, they are going to take all this year's
oats, at eleven francs in assignats. At this rate I shall not sow at
all. Besides, I do not need any for myself, as they have taken my horses
for the army wagons. To raise rye and wheat, as much of it as formerly,
is also working at a loss; I will raise no more than the little I want
for myself, and again, I suppose that this will be put in requisition,
even my supplies f