In this state was France, when an imprudent Minister of the Interior, pushed on by ambitious, designing, misguided, and reckless men, sent down as a scourge upon the country those commissaries of obnoxious memory, who were publicly charged to work their will upon the departments as they pleased, by the means they pleased, by whatever oppressive or repressive measures they pleased, provided they worked the suspected and mistrusted departments into a proper feeling of true republican principle, according to the most ultra traditional doctrines of old republicanism. Down upon the country came the autocratic commissaries with these instructions; and, in too many instances, with the best intentions of torturing and tormenting the country, after their own fashion and according to their own views, to their heart's content. Down they came, with their history of the first republic in their heads, and the desire in their hearts of emulating the zeal of those fearful representatives of the people of the last century, who ruled in the departments, each a petty, but a bloody tyrant. To all alike the same violence of disposition must not be attributed: there were a few more prudent and better-thinking men among the number--although they, in certain instances, were afterwards accused in high quarters of mild laxity, and recalled as suspected of moderatism; but the many were evidently disposed to play the tyrant to the life, in their desperate measures to twist the country to their will. The times, however, were changed; the spirit of the age no longer permitted of the same violence. _Messieurs les Commissaires_ could not well proceed by the old-established and expeditious method of cementing the foundations of republics, one and indivisible, by blood, or erecting the scaffolding of the edifice on scaffolds. Shootings, drownings, and guillotinings were instruments rather too rough to be accepted by the manners of the time. But they had other means in their power, and according to the tenor of their instructions, which they thought to use, and attempted to use, with just as much effect. They dismissed functionaries in wholesale numbers--put their creatures, or those who cringed and worshipped, in their places, with orders to brow-beat and bully the recalcitrant, and with the exhibition of high example before their eyes. They threatened and accused; and when these means failed, according to their fancy, or when they were too mild for the taste of Master Commissary, the other underhand instruments of terrorism, already mentioned, were employed to make men crouch and tremble. The manner in which mobs have been excited against the better classes, or those who were suspected of moderatism, by manœuvres unequivocally traced to the agency of the commissaries themselves, and the frightful excesses committed, are matters of common notoriety and of newspaper history. The scenes of the old Revolution were resorted to, although in another form; and