"the town police, the laying out of streets and public squares, the repairs of prisons, the road taxes and price of grain, the administration of justice, fines, confiscations, and the diet of the National Guards." He is a provincial Solon,[3115] zealous for the public welfare, and a man of executive power, he expounds his ordinances from the pulpit, and threatens the refractory. He passes decrees and renders judgments in the town-hall: outside the town limits, at the head of the National Guard, saber in hand, he will enforce his own decisions. He causes it to be decided that, on the written order of the committee, every citizen may be imprisoned. He imposes and collects taxes; he has boundary walls torn down; he goes in person to the houses of cultivators and makes requisitions for grain; he seizes the convoys which have not deposited their quote in his own richly stored granaries. One day, preceded by a drummer, he marches outside the walls, makes proclamation of "his agrarian laws," and proceeds at once to the partition of the territory, and, by virtue of the ancient communal or church property rights, to assign to himself a portion of it. All this is done in public and consciously, the notary and the scrivener being called in to draw up the official record of his acts; he is satisfied that human society has come to an end, and that each local group has the right to begin over again and apply in its own way the Constitution which it has accorded to itself without reference to anybody else.--This man, undoubtedly, talks too loudly, an proceeds too quickly; and first the bailiwick, next the Châtelet, and afterwards the National Assembly temporarily put a stop to his proceedings; but his principle is a popular one, and the forty thousand communes of France are about to act like so many distinct republics, under the sentimental and constantly more powerless reprimands of the central authority.