There had been too much spoliation, too many imprisonments, exiles, and murders, too many violations of every kind, too many invasions of the rights of property and of persons, public and private.

It was so much more difficult * To insure respect for persons and all private and public possessions; * to restrain at once both Royalists and Jacobins; * to restore 140,000 emigres to their country and yet satisfy 1,200,000 possessors of national property; * to give back to 25,000,000 of orthodox Catholics the right, faculty, and means for worshipping, and yet not allow the schismatic clergy to be maltreated; * to bring face to face in the same commune the dispossessed seigneur and the peasant holders of his domain; * to compel the delegates of the Committee of Public Safety and their victims, the shooters and the shot of Vendemiaire, the Fructidorians and the Fructidorized, the Whites and the Blues of La Vendee and Brittany, to live in peace side by side, because the future laborers in this immense work, from the village mayor to the state-senator and state-councilor, had borne a part in the Revolution, either in effecting it or under subjection to it--Monarchists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Montagnards, Thermidorians, moderate Jacobins or desperate Jacobins, all oppressed in turn and disappointed in their calculations.

Their passions, under this regime, had become embittered; each brought personal bias and resentment into the performance of his duties; to prevent him from being unjust and mischievous demanded a tightened curb.[2103] All sense of conviction, under this regime, had died out; no body would serve gratis as in 1789;[2104] nobody would work without pay; disinterestedness had lost all charm; ostentatious zeal seemed hypocrisy; genuine zeal seemed self-dupery; each looked out for himself and not for the community; public spirit had yielded to indifference, to egotism, and to the need of security, of enjoyment, and of self-advancement.

Human materials, deteriorated by the Revolution, were less than ever suited to providing citizens--they simply furnished functionaries.

With such wheels combined together according to formula current between 1791 and 1795, the requisite work could not possibly be done.