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;[115] 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;[116] "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;[117] "the secondary authorities which are the strong
points of the Revolution serve only to impede it." Decrees,