[140] - Judge
by this of their performances in the time of Robespierre, when the
vendors and administrators of the national possessions exercised
undisputed control. Everywhere, at that time, in the departments of
Var, Bouches-du-Rh?ne, and Vaucluse, "a club of would-be patriots" had
long prepared the way for their exactions. It had "paid appraisers
for depreciating whatever was put up for sale, and false names for
concealing real purchasers; "a person not of their clique, was
excluded from the auction-room; if he persisted in coming in they
would, at one time, put him under contribution for the privilege of
bidding," and, at another time, make him promise not to bid above the
price fixed by the league, while, to acquire the domain, they paid him
a bonus. Consequently, "national property" was given away "for almost
nothing," the swindlers who acquired it never being without a
satisfactory warrant for this in their own eyes. Into whose hands
could the property of anti-revolutionists better fall than into those
of patriots? According to Marat, the martyr apostle and canonised
saint of the Revolution, what is the object of the Revolution but to
give to the lowly the fortunes of the great?[141] In all national
sales everywhere, in guarding sequestrations, in all revolutionary
ransoms, taxes, loans and seizures, the same excellent argument
prevails; nowhere, in printed documents or in manuscripts, do I find
any revolutionary committee which is at once terrorist and honest.
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