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Taine, Hippolyte, 1828-1893

"The French Revolution - Volume 3"

- This is what the Jacobins do by forcibly commanding the
services of all sorts of laborers,[43] "all who help handle, transport
and retail produce and articles of prime necessity," "country people
who usually get in the crops," and, more particularly, thrashers,
reapers, carters, rafts men, and also shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths
and the rest. - At every point of the social organism, the same
principle is applied with the same result. Substitute everywhere an
external, artificial and mechanical constraint for the inward, natural
and animating stimulant, and you get nothing but an universal atrophy.
Deprive people of the fruits of their labor, and yet more, force them
to produce by fear, confiscate their time, their painstaking efforts
and their persons, reduce them to the condition of fellahs, create in
them the sentiments of fellahs, and you will have nothing but the
labor and productions of fellahs, that is to say, a minimum of labor
and production, and hence, insufficient supplies for sustaining a very
dense population, which, multiplied through a superior and more
productive civilization, will not long subsist under a barbarous,
inferior and unproductive r?gime.


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