This system of government is a very simple one and consist in maintaining the subject population in a state of extreme helplessness and of extreme terror. To this end, it is disarmed;[11115] it is kept under surveillance; all action in common is prohibited; its eyes should always be directed to the up-lifted ax and to the prison doors always open; it is ruined and decimated.--For the past six months all these rigors are decreed and applied,--disarmament of "suspects," taxes on the rich, the maximum against traders, requisitions on land-owners, wholesale arrests, rapid executions of sentences, arbitrary penalties of death, and publicized, multiplied tortures. For the past six months, all sorts of executive instruments are set up and put into operation: The Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, ambulating proconsuls with full power, local committees authorized to tax and imprison at will, a revolutionary army, a revolutionary tribunal. But, for lack of internal harmony and of central impulsion, the machine only half works, the power not being sufficient and its action not sufficiently sweeping and universal. "You are too remote from the conspiracies against you," says St. Just;[11116] "it is essential that the sword of the law should everywhere be rapidly brandished and your arm be everywhere present to arrest crime.... The ministers confess that, beyond their first and second subordinates, they find nothing but inertia and indifference."--"A similar apathy is found in all the government agents," adds Billaud-Varennes;[11117] "the secondary authorities which are the strong points of the Revolution serve only to impede it." Decrees, transmitted through administrative channels, arrive slowly and are indolently applied. "You are missing that co-active force which is the principle of being, of action, of execution.... Every good government should possess a center of willpower and the levers connected with it.... Every government activity should exclusively originate from the central source."-- "In ordinary governments," says Couthon, finally,[11118] "the right of electing belongs to the people; you cannot take it away from them. In extraordinary governments all impulsion must come from the center; it is from the convention that elections must issue.... You would injure the people by confiding the election of officials to them, because you would expose them to electing men that would betray them." --The result is that the constitutional maxims of 1789 give way to radically opposed maxims; instead of subjecting the government to the people, the people is made subject to the government. The hierarchy of the ancient régime is re-established under revolutionary terms, and henceforth all powers, much more formidable than those of the ancient régime, cease to be delegated from the depths to the summit and will henceforth instead be delegated from the summit to the bottom.