or useful: in an equalizing social system, that now
established, every article of food possessed by one individual to the
exclusion of others, is a dish abstracted from the common table and held
by him to another's detriment. On the strength of this, the theorists
who govern agree with the reigning ragamuffins. Whoever has two good
coats is an aristocrat, for there are many who have only one poor
one.[4192] Whoever has good shoes is an aristocrat, for many wear wooden
ones, and others go barefoot. Whoever owns and rents lodgings is an
aristocrat, for others, his tenants, instead of receiving money, pay it
out. The tenant who furnishes his own rooms is an aristocrat, for many
lodge in boarding-houses and others sleep in the open air. Whoever
possesses capital is an aristocrat, even the smallest amount in money or
in kind, a field, a roof over his head, half-a-dozen silver spoons given
to him by his parents on his wedding-day, an old woollen stocking into
which twenty or thirty crowns have been dropped one by one, all one's
savings, whatever has been laid by or economized, a petty assortment of
eatables or merchandise, one's crop for the year and stock of groceries,
especially if, disliking to give them up and letting his dissatisfaction
be seen, he, through revolutionary taxation and requisitions, through
the maximum and the confiscation of the precious metals, is
constrained to surrender his small savings gratis, or at half their
value.--Fundamentally, it is only those who have nothing of their own
that are held to be patriots, those who live from day to day,[4193] "the
wretched," the poor, vagabonds, and the famished; the humblest laborer,
the least instructed, the most ill at his ease, is treated as criminal,
as an enemy, as soon as he is suspected of having some resources; in
vain does he show his scarified or callous hands; he escapes neither
spoliation, the prison, nor the guillotine. At Troyes, a poor shop-girl
who had set up a small business on borrowed money, but who is ruined
by a bankruptcy and completely so by the maximum, infirm, and consuming
piecemeal the rest of her stock, is taxed five hundred livres.[4194] In
the villages of Alsace, an order is issued to arrest the five, six
or seven richest persons in the commune, even if there are no rich;
consequently, they seize the least poor, simply because they are so; for
instance, at Heiligenberg, six "farmers" one of whom is a day-laborer,
"or journey-man," "sus