In this manner an obligation to protect degenerates into a right of devastation.
Thus do humane and rational beings act, unconsciously, like irrational and inhuman beings.

Divorced from the people they misuse them; nominal chiefs, they have unlearned the function of an effective chief; having lost all public character they abate nothing of their private advantages.

So much the worse for the canton, and so much worse for themselves.

The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the head of an insurrection.

The absence of the masters, the apathy of the provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents, the corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies, indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion, misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all proceeds from the same cause and terminates in the same effect.
When sovereignty becomes transformed into a sinecure it becomes burdensome without being useful, and on becoming burdensome without being useful it is overthrown.
***** NOTES: [Footnote 1301: Beugnot, "Memoires," V.I.p.292 .-- De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution."] [Footnote 1302: Arthur Young, "Travels in France," II.456.In France, he says, it is from the eleventh to the thirty-second.