es estimate that 200,000 persons were
affected by this law.[51107] The Directory, during the three months of
existence yet remaining to it, enforces it in seventeen departments;
thousands of women and old men are arrested, put in confinement, and
ruined, while several are sent off to Cayenne--and this is called
respect for the rights of man.

VIII. Propaganda and Foreign Conquests.

Propaganda and foreign conquests.--Proximity and advantages
of Peace.--Motives of the Fructidorians for breaking off
peace negotiations with England, and for abandoning the
invasion of foreign countries.--How they found new
republics.--How governed.--Estimate of foreign rapine.
--Number of French lives sacrificed in the war.

After the system which the Fructidoreans establish in France, we may
consider the system they impose abroad--always the same contrast,
between the name and the thing, the same phrases covering the same
misdeeds, and, under proclamations of liberty the institution of
brigandage.--Undoubtedly, in any invaded province which thus passes from
an old to a new despotism, fine words cleverly spoken produce at first
the intended effect. But, in a few weeks or months, the ransomed,
enlisted and forcibly "Frenchified" inhabitants, discover that the
revolutionary right is much more oppressive, more harassing and more
rapacious than divine right.

It is the right of the strongest. The reigning Jacobins know no other,
abroad as well as at home, and, in the use they make of it, they are not
restrained like ordinary statesmen, by a thorough comprehension of the
interests of the State, by experience and tradition, by far-reaching
plans, by an estimate of present and future strength. Being a sect, they
subordinate France to their dogmas, and, with the narrow views, pride
and arrogance of the sectary, they profess the same intolerance,
the same need of domination and his instincts for propagandas and
invasion.--This belligerent and tyrannical spirit they had already
displayed under the Legislative Assembly, and they are intoxicated with
it under the Convention. After Thermidor,[51108] and after Vendemiaire,
they remained the same; they became rigid against "the faction of old
boundaries," and against any moderate policy; at first, against the
pacific minority, then against the pacific majority, against the
entreaties of all France, against their own military director, "the
organizer of victory " Ca