, the three hundred thousand
Jacobins of France will master the seven or eight millions of Girondins,
Feuillants, Royalists or Indifferents.

This system of government is a very simple one and consist in
maintaining the subject population in a state of extreme helplessness
and of extreme terror. To this end, it is disarmed;[11115] it is kept
under surveillance; all action in common is prohibited; its eyes should
always be directed to the up-lifted ax and to the prison doors always
open; it is ruined and decimated.--For the past six months all these
rigors are decreed and applied,--disarmament of "suspects," taxes on
the rich, the maximum against traders, requisitions on land-owners,
wholesale arrests, rapid executions of sentences, arbitrary penalties of
death, and publicized, multiplied tortures. For the past six months, all
sorts of executive instruments are set up and put into operation:
The Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security,
ambulating proconsuls with full power, local committees authorized
to tax and imprison at will, a revolutionary army, a revolutionary
tribunal. But, for lack of internal harmony and of central impulsion,
the machine only half works, the power not being sufficient and its
action not sufficiently sweeping and universal.

"You are too remote from the conspiracies against you," says St.
Just;[11116] "it is essential that the sword of the law should
everywhere be rapidly brandished and your arm be everywhere present
to arrest crime.... The ministers confess that, beyond their first
and second subordinates, they find nothing but inertia and
indifference."--"A similar apathy is found in all the government
agents," adds Billaud-Varennes;[11117] "the secondary authorities
which are the strong points of the Revolution serve only to impede it."
Decrees, transmitted through administrative channels, arrive slowly and
are indolently applied. "You are missing that co-active force which
is the principle of being, of action, of execution.... Every good
government should possess a center of willpower and the levers connected
with it.... Every government activity should exclusively originate from
the central source."--

"In ordinary governments," says Couthon, finally,[11118] "the right of
electing belongs to the people; you cannot take it away from them. In
extraordinary governments all impulsion must come from the center; it is
from the convention that elections must issue.... You