Taxes were assessed at random. Those who could not or would not pay the sum demanded were imprisoned and their revenues confiscated. Persons in possession of metal money were made to exchange it for assignats. In every third department at least executions continually took place. There were no less than 178 extraordinary or revolutionary courts of one and another kind. Many observed no forms whatever, and passed several hundred judgments in a single sitting. So small was the control exercised by the central Government, that the Committee of Public Safety was in ignorance of the existence of some of these courts or of the number of persons punished by their decrees. The Catholic religion was proscribed. Before the worship of Reason was established at Paris, Hébertist deputies were confiscating the plate of churches, prohibiting the exercise of Catholic rites, and making bonfires of religious books and relics. Constitutional priests were imprisoned and guillotined by the score. Between one and two thousand married and abjured their faith. The observance of Sunday was prohibited. On the first days of the new weeks of ten days, feasts in honour of Reason, of Equality, of Liberty, and the like, were held in the churches, from which none remained absent without risk of being classed in the category of suspected persons. In every department property was confiscated, many persons imprisoned, and lives taken. But the amount of suffering inflicted and blood shed in any one department, nevertheless, depended in some degree on the character of the deputy in mission, and on the part that had been taken by the department after the expulsion of the Girondists. The Government had the support of a small number of men who, if fanatics, were nevertheless honest in believing that, whatever its excesses, it alone could save France from conquest, and who endeavoured to make use of their authority, not for personal or selfish ends, but for the public good, as they understood the term. Such men might be cruel; but if so, it was with a motive, not through cowardice, or the mere pleasure taken by the tyrant in making his power felt. St. Just, in Alsace, took from the citizens of Strasburg their coats, their beds, their boots, or whatever else he wanted to supply the wants of the soldiers. The municipal officers were commanded to provide 10,000 pairs of boots in the course of twenty-four hours. ‘Take,’ the youthful dictator wrote to them, ‘the boots off the feet of the aristocrats.’ In Auvergne, Couthon, while he exercised a grinding tyranny, aspired to win the attachment of the population. He obtained State grants for the embellishment of Clermont, his native town, established a manufactory of arms to give employment to destitute workmen, founded a college in the interests of education, and let out of prison a number of peasant farmers. But men of the description of St. Just and Couthon were rare. Far more often deputies in mission sought to enrich