They would have been composed of 540,000 members costing the public 591 millions per year.[3356] This would have made the regular administrative body, already twice as numerous and twice as costly as under the ancient regime, an extra corps expending, "simply in surveillance," one hundred millions more than the entire taxation of the country, the greatness of which had excited the people against the ancient regime .-- Happily, the poisonous and monstrous fungal growth was only able to achieve half its intended size; neither the Jacobin seed nor the bad atmosphere it required to make it spread could be found anywhere.

"The people of the provinces," says a contemporary,[3357] "are not up to the level of the Revolution; it opposes old habits and customs and the resistance of inertia to innovations which it does not understand." "The plowman is an estimable man," writes a missionary representative, "but he is generally a poor patriot."[3358] Actually, there is on the one hand, less of human sediment in the departmental towns than in the great Parisian sink, and, on the other hand, the rural population, preserved from intellectual miasmas, better resists social epidemics than the urban population.

Less infested with vicious adventurers, less fruitful in disordered intellects, the provinces supply a corps of inquisitors and terrorists with greater difficulty.
And first, in the thousands of communes which have less than five hundred inhabitants,[3359] in many other villages of greater population, but scattered[3360] and purely agricultural, especially in those in which patois is spoken, there is a scarcity of suitable subjects for a revolutionary committee.

People make use of their hands too much; horny hands do not write every day; nobody desires to take up a pen, especially to keep a register that may be preserved and some day or other prove compromising.

It is already a difficult matter to recruit a municipal council, to find a mayor, the two additional municipal officers, and the national agent which the law requires; in the small communes, these are the only agents of the revolutionary government, and I fancy that, in most cases, their Jacobin fervor is moderate.