despoil parents for the misdemeanors of their children, and render
even women responsible for a military and personal offence."

Such is the admirable calculation of the Directory--that, if it loses
a soldier it gains a patrimony, and if the patrimony fails, it recovers
the soldier: in any event, it fills its coffers and its ranks, while
the faction, well supplied with men, may continue turning all Europe to
account, wasting, in the operation, as many French lives as it pleases;
requiring more than one hundred thousand men per annum, which, including
those which the Convention has squandered, makes nearly nine hundred
thousand in eight years.[51128] At this moment the five Directors
and their minions are completing the mowing down of the virile, adult
strength of the nation,[51129] and we have seen through what motives
and for what object. I do not believe that any civilized nation was ever
sacrificed in the same way, for such a purpose and by such rulers: the
crippled remnant of a faction and sect, some hundreds of preachers
no longer believing in their creed, usurpers as despised as they are
detested, second-rate parvenus raised their heads not through their
capacity or merit, but through the blind upheavals of a revolution,
swimming on the surface for lack of weight, and, like foul scum, borne
along to the crest of the wave-such are the wretches who strangle France
under the pretence of setting her free, who bleed her under the pretence
of making her strong, who conquer populations under the pretence of
emancipating them, who despoil people under the pretence of regenerating
them, and who, from Brest to Lucerne, from Amsterdam to Naples, slay and
rob wholesale, systematically, to strengthen the incoherent dictatorship
of their brutality, folly and corruption.

IX. National Disgust.

National antipathy to the established order of things.
--Paralysis of the State.--Internal discords of the Jacobin
party.--Coup d'Etat of Floreal 22, year VI.--Coup d'Etat of
Prairial 30, year VII.--Impossibility of establishing a
viable government.--Plans of Barras and Sieyes.

Once again has triumphant Jacobinism shown its anti-social nature, its
capacity for destruction, its impotence to re-construct.--The nation,
vanquished and discouraged, no longer resists, but, if it submits it
is as to a pestilence, while its transportations, its administrative
purifications, its decrees placing towns in a state