"Among officials and agents, good or bad, constituted or not constituted, that alone governs which is inviolable. Now the club, for a long time, has been too much accustomed to domineering, to annoying, to persecuting, to wreaking vengeance, for any local administration to regard it in any other light than as inviolable."[2457] They accordingly govern and their indirect influence is promptly transformed into direct authority.--Voting alone, or almost alone, in the primary meetings, which are deserted or under constraint, the Jacobins easily choose the municipal body and the officers of the National Guard.[2458] After this, through the mayor, who is their tool or their accomplice, they have the legal right to launch or arrest the entire armed force and they avail themselves of it.--Two obstacles still stand in their way. One the one hand, however conciliatory or timid the Directory of the district or department may be, elected as it is by electors of the second degree, it usually contains a fair proportion of well-informed men, comfortably off, interested in keeping order, and less inclined than the municipality to put up with gross violations of the law. Consequently the Jacobins denounce it to the National Assembly as an unpatriotic and anti-revolutionary center of "bourgeois aristocracy." Sometimes, as at Brest,[2459] they shamefully disobey orders which are perfectly legal and proper, often repeated and strictly formal; afterward, still more shamefully, they demand of the Minister if, "placed in the cruel alternative of giving offense to the hierarchy of powers, or of leaving the commonwealth in danger, they ought to hesitate." Sometimes, as at Arras, they impose themselves illegally on the Directory in session and browbeat it so insolently as to make it a point of honor with the latter to solicit its own suspension.[2460] Sometimes, as a Figeac, they summon an administrator to their bar, keep him standing three-quarters of an hour, seize his papers and oblige him, for fear of something worse, to leave the town.[2461] Sometimes, as at Auch, they invade the Directory's chambers, seize the administrators by the throat, pound them with their fists and clubs, drag the president by the hair, and, after a good deal of trouble, grant him his life.[2462]--On the other hand, the gendarmerie and the troops brought for the suppression of riots, are always in the way of those who stir up the rioters. Consequently, they expel, corrupt and, especially purify the gendarmerie together with the troops. At Cahors they drive out a sergeant of the gendarmerie, "alleging that he keeps company with none but aristocrats."[2463] At Toulouse, without mentioning the lieutenant-colonel, whose life they threaten by anonymous letters and oblige to leave the town, they transfer the whole corps to another district under the pretense that "its principles are adverse to the Constitution."[2464] At Auch, and at Rennes, through the insubordination