The result was an outcry in the poorer districts of the city against all speculators and capitalists. Demands were raised for the rigid regulation of trade, for cheap food, for the fixing of prices, and for imperative laws to keep up the value of the paper money. The Commune took up the popular cry, and demanded with success large grants from the Treasury, in order to provide the capital with bread. Marat, as usual, denounced his opponents and incited the people to help themselves; and at the end of February, Marat's encouragement produced a somewhat formidable riot, in which many tradesmen who were not Jacobins suffered serious loss. The leaders of the Mountain, that is the leaders of the Jacobins in the Convention, who had little economic knowledge, and who, seeing distress and scarcity, believed it possible to end them by arbitrary laws, supported the demand for exceptional measures. The indifferent members of the Centre, whose acquaintance with economic laws was probably no wider than that of the Mountain, gave their consent to proposals which they hoped would quiet Paris and avert insurrection. Danton suggested that the price of bread should be regulated by the rate of wages. In April and May a series of summary decrees were passed by the Convention entailing the most severe penalties on all who trafficked in the currency, establishing a Maximum price for grain, and imposing a heavy tax in the shape of a forced loan upon the rich. These measures, again, damaged the Girondists in Paris. They had as a party a clearer conception than their opponents of the danger of arbitrary interference with prices and with trade. Some of their leaders opposed the proposals of the Commune, and even ventured to protest against the grants spent in providing cheap bread for the capital. But their protests only increased their unpopularity in Paris, and led to demands for their punishment and removal, to fresh threats and denunciations. On the 10th March, a fresh insurrection was set on foot in some of the Sections, with the object of marching on the Convention and getting rid of the Girondists by force. But it was discountenanced by the Jacobin leaders, and it ended in an ineffectual riot. The alarm, however, created by the bad news from the frontier tended to heighten the political fever, and with that the risk of insurrection. In March and April the danger was increased by the serious rising in La Vendée, which, beginning in a series of isolated outbreaks occasioned by the conscription and by local causes, developed into a widespread political movement on behalf of monarchical ideas, and by its spirit and its successes seemed to threaten the safety of the Republic.