The policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a
subdued people and insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in
them lay, to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion,
in polity, in laws, and in manners; to confound all territorial
limits; to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties to
auction; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low
everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which could
serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people
under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the
manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the
Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations. They destroyed the
bonds of their union under color of providing for the independence
of each of their cities.
When the members who compose these new bodies of cantons,
communes, and departments- arrangements purposely produced through the
medium of confusion- begin to act, they will find themselves in a
great measure strangers to one another. The electors and elected
throughout, especially in the rural cantons, will be frequently
without any civil habitudes or connections, or any of that natural
discipline which is the soul of a true republic. Magistrates and
collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their
districts, bishops with their dioceses, or curates with their
parishes.
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