Suppose an extensive domain of which the steward is appointed, not by the absent owner, but by his tenants, debtors, farmers, and dependents: the reader may imagine whether rents will be paid and debts collected, whether road-taxes will be worked out, what care will be taken of the property, what its annual income will be to the owner, how abuses of commission and omission will be multiplied indefinitely, how great the disorder will be, the neglect, the waste, the fraud, the injustice, and the license.--The same in France,[2106] and for the same reason: * every public service disorganized, destroyed, or perverted; * no justice, no police; * authorities abstaining from prosecution, magistrates not daring to condemn, a gendarmerie which receives no orders or which stands still; * rural marauding become a habit; * roving bands of brigands in forty-five departments; * mail wagons and coaches stopped and pillaged even up to the environs of Paris; * highways broken up and rendered impassable; * open smuggling, customs yielding nothing, national forests devastated, the public treasury empty,[2107] its revenues intercepted and expended before being deposited, taxes decreed and not collected; * everywhere arbitrary assessments of real and personal estate, no less wicked exemptions than overcharges; * in many places no list prepared for tax assessments, * communes which here and there, under pretext of defending the republic against neighboring consumers, exempt themselves from both tax and conscription; * conscripts to whom their mayor gives false certificates of infirmity and marriage, who do not turn out when ordered out, who desert by hundreds on the way to headquarters, who form mobs and use guns in defending themselves against the troops,--such were the fruits of the system. The government could not constrain rural majorities with the officials chosen by the selfish and inept rural majorities. Neither could it repress the urban minorities with agents elected by the same partial and corrupt urban minorities. Hands are necessary, and hands as firm as tenacious, to seize conscripts by the collar, to rummage the pockets of taxpayers, and the State did not have such hands. They were required right away, if only to prepare and provide for urgent needs. If the western departments had to be subdued and tranquilized, relief furnished to Massena besieged in Genoa, Mélas prevented from invading Provence, Moreau's army transported over the Rhine, the first thing was to restore to the central government the appointment of local authorities. V. Reasons for centralization. Reasons for placing the executive central power in one hand.--Sieyès' chimerical combinations.--Bonaparte's objections.