while the requisitions,
enforced in the most rigorous and imposing style, produce nothing or
next to nothing." Misery augments from week to week: "it is impossible
to form any idea of it; the people of Caen live on brown bread and the
blood of cattle. ... Every countenance bears traces of the famine...
Faces are of livid hue.... It is impossible to await the new crop, until
the end of Fructidor."--Such are the exclamations everywhere. The object
now, indeed, is to cross the narrowest and most terrible defile; a
fortnight more of absolute fasting and hundreds of thousands of lives
would be sacrificed.[42130] At this moment the government half opens the
doors of its storehouses; it lends a few sacks of flour on condition
of re-payment,--for example, at Cherbourg a few hundreds of quintals
of oats; by means of oat bread, the poor can subsist until the coming
harvest. But above all, it doubles its guard and shows its bayonets.
At Nancy, a traveler sees[42131] "more than three thousand persons
soliciting in vain for a few pounds of flour." They are dispersed with
the butt-ends of muskets.--Thus are the peasantry taught patriotism and
the townspeople patience. Physical constraint exercised on all in the
name of all; this is the only procedure which an arbitrary socialism can
resort to for the distribution of food and to discipline starvation.

VII. Misery at Paris.

Famine and misery at Paris.--Steps taken by the government
to feed the capital.--Monthly cost to the Treasury.--Cold
and hunger in the winter of 1794-1795.--Quality of the
bread.--Daily rations diminished.--Suffering, especially of
the populace.--Excessive physical suffering, despair,
suicides, and deaths from exhaustion in 1795.--Government
dinners and suppers.--Number of lives lost through want and
war.--Socialism as applied, and its effects on comfort,
well-being and mortality.

Anything that a totalitarian government may do to ensure that the
capital is supplied with food is undertaken and carried out by this
one, for here is its seat, and one more degree of dearth in Paris
would overthrow it. Each week, on reading the daily reports of its
agents,[42132] it finds itself on the verge of explosion; twice, in
Germinal and Prairial, a popular outbreak does overthrow it for a few
hours, and, if it maintains itself, it is on the condition of
either giving the needy a piece of bread or the hope of getting it.
Con