e small communes.--Municipal bodies lukewarm in the
villages.--Jacobins too numerous in bourgs and small towns.
--Unreliable or hampered as agents when belonging to the
administrative bodies of large or moderate-sized towns.
--Deficiency of locally recruited staff.

Had the laws of March 21 and September 5, 1793, been strictly enforced,
there would, instead of 21,500 have been 45,000 of these revolutionary
committees. They would have been composed of 540,000 members costing
the public 591 millions per year.[3356] This would have made the regular
administrative body, already twice as numerous and twice as costly
as under the ancient regime, an extra corps expending, "simply in
surveillance," one hundred millions more than the entire taxation of
the country, the greatness of which had excited the people against the
ancient regime.--Happily, the poisonous and monstrous fungal growth was
only able to achieve half its intended size; neither the Jacobin seed
nor the bad atmosphere it required to make it spread could be found
anywhere. "The people of the provinces," says a contemporary,[3357] "are
not up to the level of the Revolution; it opposes old habits and
customs and the resistance of inertia to innovations which it does not
understand." "The plowman is an estimable man," writes a missionary
representative, "but he is generally a poor patriot."[3358] Actually,
there is on the one hand, less of human sediment in the departmental
towns than in the great Parisian sink, and, on the other hand, the rural
population, preserved from intellectual miasmas, better resists
social epidemics than the urban population. Less infested with vicious
adventurers, less fruitful in disordered intellects, the provinces
supply a corps of inquisitors and terrorists with greater difficulty.

And first, in the thousands of communes which have less than five
hundred inhabitants,[3359] in many other villages of greater population,
but scattered[3360] and purely agricultural, especially in those in
which patois is spoken, there is a scarcity of suitable subjects for a
revolutionary committee. People make use of their hands too much;
horny hands do not write every day; nobody desires to take up a pen,
especially to keep a register that may be preserved and some day or
other prove compromising. It is already a difficult matter to recruit
a municipal council, to find a mayor, the two additional municipal
officers, and the national