Evidently, to reassure it, a message from the Minister of the Interior chosen by the Assembly, to the lieutenant of police whom he had appointed, to come to his office every morning, would be all that was necessary.

But it is deprived of this simple resource by its own act, and has no other expedient than to appoint a committee of investigation to discover crimes of "treason against the nation."[2148] What could be more vague than such a term?
What could be more mischievous than such an institution ?--Renewed every month, deprived of special agents, composed of credulous and inexperienced deputies, this committee, set to perform the work of a Lenoir or a Fouche, makes up for its incapacity by violence, and its proceedings anticipate those of the Jacobine inquisition.[2149] Alarmist and suspicious, it encourages accusations, and, for lack of plots to discover, it invents them.
Inclinations, in its eyes, stand for actions, and floating projects become accomplished outrages.

On the denunciation of a domestic who has listened at a door, on the gossip of a washerwoman who has found a scrap of paper in a dressing-gown, on the false interpretation of a letter, on vague indications which it completes and patches together by the strength of its imagination, it forges a coup d'etat, makes examinations, domiciliary visits, nocturnal surprises and arrests;[2150] it exaggerates, blackens, and comes in public session to denounce the whole affair to the National Assembly.

First comes the plot of the Breton nobles to deliver Brest to the English;[2151] then the plot for hiring brigands to destroy the crops; then the plot of 14th of July to burn Paris; then the plot of Favras to murder Lafayette, Necker, and Bailly; then the plot of Augeard to carry off the King, and many others, week after week, not counting those which swarm in the brains of the journalists, and which Desmoulins, Freron, and Marat reveal with a flourish of trumpets in each of their publications.
"All these alarms are cried daily in the streets like cabbages and turnips, the good people of Paris inhaling them along with the pestilential vapors of our mud."[2152] ..............Now, in this aspect, as well as in a good many others, the Assembly is the people; satisfied that it is in danger,[2153] it makes laws as the former make their insurrections, and protects itself by strokes of legislation as the former protects itself by blows with pikes.

Failing to take hold of the motor spring by which it might direct the government machine, it distrusts all the old and all the new wheels.
The old ones seem to it an obstacle, and, instead of utilizing them, it breaks them one by one--parliaments, provincial states, religious orders, the church, the nobles, and royalty.