Still more inactive than
he, his colleagues, condemned to an indefinite listlessness, under
lock and key in the common prison, no longer attend to their business.
- There is a general, total paralysis of those natural organs which,
in economic life, produce, elaborate, receive, store, preserve,
exchange and transmit in large quantities; and as an after effect,
embarrass, saturate, or weaken all the lesser subordinate organs to
which the superior ones no longer provide outlets, intermediary
agencies or aliment.
It is now the turn of the small enterprises. Whatever their
sufferings may be they are ordered to carry their work out as in
normal times, and they will be forced to do this. The Convention,
pursuing its accustomed rigid logical course with its usual
shortsightedness, lays on them its violent and inept hands; they are
trodden down, trampled upon and mauled for the purpose of curing them.
Farmers are forbidden to sell their produce except in the markets, and
obliged to bring to these a quota of so many sacks per week, military
raids compelling them to furnish their quotas.[38] Shopkeepers are
ordered "to expose for sale, daily and publicly, all goods and
provisions of prime necessity" that they have on hand, while a maximum
price is established, above which no one shall sell "bread, flour and
grain, vegetables and fruits, wine, vinegar, cider, beer and brandy,
fresh meat, salt meat, pork, cattle, dried, salted, smoked or pickled
fish, butter, honey, sugar, sweet-oil, lamp-oil, candles, firewood,
charcoal and other coal, salt, soap, soda, potash, leather, iron,
steel, castings, lead, brass, hemp, linen, woolens, canvas and woven
stuffs, sabots, shoes and tobacco.
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