itself through foreign requisitions, in Belgium,
in the Palatinate and on the frontier provinces of Italy and
Spain.--Finally, most fortunate of all, Robespierre, Saint Just and
Couthon, the Paris commune and the theorist Jacobins, are guillotined
on the 23rd of July, and with them falls despotic socialism. Henceforth,
the Jacobin edifice crumbles, owing to great crevices in its walls. The
"maximum," in fact, is no longer maintained, while the Convention, at
the end of December, 1794, legally abolishes it. The farmers now sell as
they please and at two prices, according as they are paid in assignats
or coin; their hope, confidence and courage are restored; in October and
November, 1794, they voluntarily do their own plowing and planting, and
still more gladly will they gather in their own crops in July, 1795.
Nevertheless, we can judge by the discouragement into which they had
been plunged by four months of the system, the utter prostration into
which they would have fallen had the system lasted an indefinite time.
It is very probable that cultivation at the end of one or two years
would have proved unproductive or have ceased altogether. Already,
subject to every sort of exhortation and threat, the peasant had
remained inert, apparently deaf and insensible, like an overloaded beast
of burden which, so often struck, grows obstinate or sinks down and
refuses to move. It is evident that he would have never stirred again
could Saint-Just, holding him by the throat, have bound him hand and
foot, as he had done at Strasbourg, in the multiplied knots of his
Spartan Utopia. We should have seen what labor and the stagnation
it produces comes to, when managed through State maneuvers by
administrative manikins and humanitarian automatons. This experiment
had been tried in China, in the eleventh century, and according to
principles, long and regularly, by a well manipulated and omnipotent
State, on the most industrious and soberest people in the world, and men
died in myriads like flies. If the French, at the end of 1794 and during
the following years did not die like flies, it was because the Jacobin
system was relaxed too soon.[4298]

VI. Relaxation.

Relaxation of the Revolutionary system after Thermidor.
--Repeal of the Maximum.--New situation of the peasant.--He
begins to cultivation again.--Requisition of grain by the
State.--The cultivator indemnifies himself at the expense of
private person