For, on the one hand, being merely on the march, they are much safer from punishment than local murderers; in a week, lost in the army, they will not be sought for in camp, and they may slay with perfect security.

On the other hand, as they are strangers and newcomers, they are not able, like local persons, to identify a person.
So on account of a name, a dress, qualifications, a coffee-house rumor, or an appearance, however venerable and harmless a man may be, they kill him, not because they know him, but because they do not know him.
VI .-- A tour of France in the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior.
From Carcassonne to Bordeaux .-- Bordeaux to Caen .-- The north and the east .-- Chalons-sur-Marne to Lyons .-- The Comtat and Provence .-- The tone and the responses of the Jacobin administration .-- The programme of the party.
Let us enter the cabinet of Roland, Minister of the Interior, a fortnight after the opening of the Convention, and suppose him contemplating, some evening, in miniature, a picture of the state of the country administered by him.

His clerks have placed the correspondence of the past few weeks on his table, arranged in proper order; his replies are noted in brief on the margin; he has a map of France before him, and, placing his finger on the southern section, he moves it along the great highway across the country.

At every stage he recurs to the paper file of letters, and passing innumerable reports of violence, he merely gives his attention to the great revolutionary exploits.[3252] Madame Roland, I imagine, works with her husband, and the couple, sitting together alone under the lamp, ponder over the doings of the ferocious brute which they have set free in the provinces the same as in Paris.
Their eyes go first to the southern extremity of France.

There,[3253] on the canal of the Deux-Mers, at Carcassonne, the population has seized three boats loaded with grain, demanded provisions, then a lower prices of bread, then guns and cannon from the magazine, and, lastly, the heads of the administrators; an inspector-general has been wounded by an axe, and the syndic-attorney of the department, M.Verdie; massacred .-- The Minister follows with his eye the road from Carcassonne to Bordeaux, and on the right and on the left he finds traces of blood.