These troubles, it is said, are transient; on the Constitution being proclaimed, order will return of itself. Very well, the Constitution is voted, accepted by the King, proclaimed, and entrusted to the Legislative Assembly. Let the Legislative Assembly consider what is done in the first few weeks. In the eight departments that surround Paris, there are riots on every market-day; farms are invaded and the cultivators of the soil are ransomed by bands of vagabonds; the mayor of Melun is riddled with balls and dragged out from the hands of the mob streaming with blood.[2303] At Belfort, a riot for the purpose of retaining a convoy of coin, and the commissioner of the Upper-Rhine in danger of death; at Bouxvillers, owners of property attacked by poor National Guards, and by the soldiers of Salm-Salm, houses broken into and cellars pillaged; at Mirecourt, a flock of women beating drums, and, for three days, holding the Hôtel-de-Ville in a state of siege.----One day Rochefort is in a state of insurrection, and the workmen of the harbor compel the municipality to unfurl the red flag.[2304] On the following day, it is Lille, the people of which, "unwilling to exchange its money and assignats for paper-rags, called billets de confiance, gather into mobs and threaten, while a whole garrison is necessary to prevent an explosion." On the 16th of October, it is Avignon in the power of bandits, with the abominable butchery of the Glacière. On the 5th of November, at Caen, there are eighty-two gentlemen, townsmen and artisans, knocked down and dragged to prison, for having offered their services to the municipality as special constables. On the 14th of November, at Montpellier, the roughs triumph; eight men and women are killed in the streets or in their houses, and all conservatives are disarmed or put to flight. By the end of October, it is a gigantic column of smoke and flame shooting upward suddenly from week to week and spreading everywhere, growing, on the other side of the Atlantic, into civil war in St. Domingo, where wild beasts are let loose against their keepers; 50,000 blacks take the field, and, at the outset, 1,000 whites are assassinated, 15,000 Negroes slain, 200 sugar-mills destroyed and damage done to the amount of 600,000,000; "a colony of itself alone worth ten provinces, is almost annihilated."[2305] At Paris, Condorcet is busy writing in his journal that "this news is not reliable, there being no object in it but to create a French empire beyond the seas for the King, where there will be masters and slaves." A corporal of the Paris National Guard, on his own authority, orders the King to remain indoors, fearing that he may escape, and forbids a sentinel to let him go out after nine o'clock in the evening;[2306] at the Tuileries, stump-speakers in the open air denounce aristocrats and priests; at the Palais-Royal, there is a pandemonium of public lust and incendiary speeches.[2307] There are centers of riot in all quarters, "as many