in the eyes of their subjects, they are wild animals. — This shows to what privileges can lead when divorced from duties.  In this manner an obligation to protect degenerates into a right of devastation.  Thus do humane and rational beings act, unconsciously, like irrational and inhuman beings.  Divorced from the people they misuse them; nominal chiefs, they have unlearned the function of an effective chief; having lost all public character they abate nothing of their private advantages.  So much the worse for the canton, and so much worse for themselves.  The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the head of an insurrection.  The absence of the masters, the apathy of the provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents, the corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies, indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion, misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all proceeds from the same cause and terminates in the same effect.

When sovereignty becomes transformed into a sinecure it becomes burdensome without being useful, and on becoming burdensome without being useful it is overthrown.

_______________________________________________________

_______________
Notes: 
[1].   Beugnot, “Mémoires,” V.  I.  p.292.  — De Tocqueville, “L’Ancien
Régime et la Révolution.”

[2].  Arthur Young, “Travels in France,” II. 456.  In France, he says, it is from the eleventh to the thirty-second.  “But nothing is known like the enormities committed in England where the tenth is really taken.”

[3].  Saint-Simon, “Mémoires,” ed.  Chéruel, vol.  I. — Lucas de Montigny, “Mémoires de Mirabeau,” I. 53-182. — Marshal Marmont, “Mémoires,” I. 9, 11. — Châteaubriand, “Mémoires,” I. 17.  De Montlosier, “Mémoires,” 2 vol. passim. — Mme. de Larochejacquelein, “Souvenirs,” passim.  Many details concerning the types of the old nobility will be found in these passages.  They are truly and forcibly depicted in two novels by Balzac in “Beatrix,” (the Baron de Guénic) and in the “Cabinet des Antiques,” (the Marquis d’ Esgrignon).

[4].  A letter of the bailiff of Mirabeau, 1760, published by M. de Loménie in the “Correspondant,” V. 49, p.132.

[5].  Mme. de Larochejacquelein, ibid.  I. 84.  “As M. de Marigny had some knowledge of the veterinary art the peasants of the canton came after him when they had sick animals.”

[6].  Marquis de Mirabeau, “Traité de la Population,” p. 57.

[7].  De Tocqueville, ibid. p.180.  This is proved by the registers of the capitation-tax which was paid at the actual domicile.

[8].  Renauldon, ibid.., Preface p. 5. — Anne Plumptre, “A narrative of three years residence in France from 1802 to 1805.”  II. 357. —­ Baroness Oberkirk, “Mémoires,” II. 389. — “De l’état religieux,” by the abbés Bonnefoi and Bernard, 1784, p. 295. — Mme.Vigée-Lébrun, “Souvenirs,” p.171.