In regions where the temperament of the people is cool, and where there is no resistance, it is pointless to resort to assault and battery.

What is the use is killing in a town like Arras, for instance, where, on the day of the civic oath, the president of the department, a prudent millionaire, stalks through the streets arm in arm with Aunty Duchesne, who sells cookies down in a cellar, where, on election days, the townspeople, through cowardice, elect the club candidates under the pretense that "rascals and beggars" must be sent off to Paris to purge the town of them![3226] It would be labor lost to strike people who grovel so well.[3227] The faction is content to mark them as mangy curs, to put them in pens, keep them on a leash, and to annoy them.[3228] It posts at the entrance of the guard-room a list of inhabitants related to an emigre; it makes domiciliary visits; it draws up a fancied list of the suspected, on which list all that are rich are found inscribed.

It insults and disarms them; it confines them to the town; it forbids them to go outside of it even on foot; it orders them to present themselves daily before its committee of public safety; it condemns them to pay their taxes for a year in twenty-four hours; it breaks the seals of their letters; it confiscates, demolishes, and sells their family tombs in the cemeteries.

This is all in order, as is the religious persecution, * with the irruption into private chapels where mass is said, * with blows with gun-stocks and the fist bestowed on the officiating priest, * with the obligation of orthodox parents to have their children baptized by the schismatic cure, * with the expulsion of nuns, and * with the pursuit, imprisonment and transportation of unsworn ecclesiastics.
But if the domination of the club is not always a bloody one, the judgments are always those of an armed man, who, putting his gun to his shoulder, aims at the wayfarers whom he has stopped on the road.
Generally they kneel down, tender their purses, and the shot is not fired.

But the gun is cocked, nevertheless, and, to be certain of this, we have only to look at the shriveled hand grasping the trigger.