or the year! I had rather let my fields lie fallow.
Just see now, they are taking all the live three months' pigs! Luckily,
I killed mine be forehand and it is now in the pork barrel. But they are
going to claim all salt provisions like the rest. The new grabbers
are worse than the old ones. Six months more, and we shall all die
of hunger. It is better to cross one's arms at once and go to prison;
there, at least, we shall be fed and not have to work."

In effect, they allow themselves to be imprisoned, the best of the small
cultivators and proprietors by thousands, and Lindet,[4292] at the head
of the Commission on Provisions, speaks with dismay of the ground being
no longer tilled, of cattle in France being no more abundant than the
year before, and of nothing to be had to cut this year.

For a strange thing has happened, unheard of in Europe, almost
incredible to any one familiar with the French peasant and his love of
work. This field which he has ploughed, manured, harrowed and reaped
with his own hands, its precious crop, the crop that belongs to him and
on which he has feasted his eyes for seven months, now that it is ripe,
he will not take the trouble to gather it; it would be bothering himself
for some one else. As the crop that he sees there is for the government,
let the government defray the final cost of getting it in; let it do the
harvesting, the reaping, the putting it in sheaves, the carting and
the thrashing in the barn.--Thereupon, the representatives on mission
exclaim, each shouting in a louder or lower key, according to his
character.

"Many of the cultivators," writes Dartigoyte,[4293] "affect a supreme
indifference for this splendid crop. One must have seen it, as I have,
to believe how great the neglect of the wheat is in certain parts,
how it is smothered by the grass.... Draft, if the case requires it, a
certain number of inhabitants in this or that commune to work in another
one.... Every man who refuses to work, except on the 'decade' day, must
be punished as an ill-disposed citizen, as a royalist."--

"Generous friends of nature," writes Ferry,[4294] introduce amongst you,
perpetuate around you, the habit of working in common and begin with the
present crop. Do not spare either indolent women or indolent men, those
social parasites, many of whom you doubtless have in your midst. What!
allow lazy men and lazy women where we are! Where should we find a
Republican police?... Immediately on