"
In the municipal body, the majority is composed of an incompetent lot,
some of them being journeymen-spinners or thread twisters, and others
second-hand dealers or shopkeepers, "incapable," "without means," with
a few crack-brains among them: one, "his brain being crazed,
absolutely of no account, anarchist and Jacobin;" another, "very
dangerous through lack of judgment, a Jacobin, over-excited; " a
third, "an instrument of tyranny, a man of blood capable of every
vice, having assumed the name of Mutius Sc?vola, of recognized
depravity and unable to write." - Similarly, in the Aube districts, we
find some of the heads feverish with the prevailing epidemic, for
instance, at Nogent, the national agent, Delaporte, "who has the words
'guillotine' and 'revolutionary tribunal' always on his lips, and who
declares that if he were the government he would imprison doctor,
surgeon and lawyer, who delights in finding people guilty and says
that he is never content except when he gets three pounds' weight of
denunciations a day." But, apart from these madcaps, most of the
administrators or judges are either people wholly unworthy of their
offices, because they are "inept," "too uneducated," "good for
nothing," "too little familiar with administrative forms," "too little
accustomed to judicial action," " without information," "too busy with
their own affairs," "unable to read or write," or, because "they have
no delicacy," are "violent," "agitators," "knaves," "without public
esteem," and more or less dishonest and despised.
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