chief responsibility for the maintenance of order lay. It would not have been easy to create a system more complicated or difficult to work. The object of establishing these numerous bodies with their innumerable officials was that they might balance and control each other. The result was the paralysis of all. The immense number of the new officials rendered impossible rapidity of work. The cost of their salaries, though individually low, was cumulatively very high. The strangeness of their functions, which were very numerous, and which included the assessment and collection of the taxes, the maintenance of religion, of education, and of public works, the control of streets and highways, of sanitation, of the poor law, of prisons and of police, would in any case have been embarrassing enough; but it became far more so, when no one could tell where his own functions ended and another man's began. Half of the new officials found the other half from the first inclined to question their authority, to dispute their commands, and to accuse them of over-stepping their rights. The higher among them had no power of enforcing obedience from their subordinates, who argued against orders which they disliked, and acted on them or not, as they pleased. In the confusion of the time the habits of discipline and obedience were naturally lax, and refractory underlings could plead with some force that they were just as well qualified as their superiors to interpret the principles of the Rights of Man. Accordingly, it soon became apparent that the real authority under the new system lay not in the high officials of the departments, or in the helpless Ministers at Paris, but in the forty-four thousand communes, which in many respects were independent of their superiors, and which managed their own affairs. To the communal authorities was entrusted the task of repressing riots and disorder, and the control for that purpose of military force. On them was thrown an immense amount of executive work, and the duty of carrying out in detail all the great social and political reforms, by which, month after month, the decrees of the National Assembly were changing the face of France. In many places the communal or municipal officials were ignorant and uneducated men, for in the country parishes there were often no bourgeois, the local priests were ineligible for office, and the local gentry were fugitives or 'suspects.' In twenty thousand of the new municipalities, it was stated in the Assembly, the officials elected could not read or write. Men of this description--men indeed of any description--overwhelmed with work, surrounded by novelties and disorder, and perplexed by the multitude of their duties and coadjutors, were certain to find their task beyond them, and speedily to fall into confusion and arrears. No sooner had the new system been established, than its servants began unwillingly to discover how impossible it was to work it with success.