habitants of barren countries, whose extreme fatigues would never have yielded other than extreme poverty, would behold themselves consoled for the labours they had bestowed, and invited to participate in the riches of more productive soils.
With respect to transport, the Insurrectional Committee was of opinion that society ought to consider it not merely as an indispensable means of providing the inhabitants of one district with the surplus products of another, but also as a happy occasion for strengthening the love of country, by bringing home to every individual the knowledge of its beauties, of its institutions, and of the benefits of the equality to be established by the laws; consequently, they wished that every citizen capable of work should be called in turn to this function, as also to those of courier, bearer of dispatches, &c. Let my readers bear in mind that I have not before me all the documents to which the conspirators had committed their most secret thoughts; I cannot, therefore, develop in detail all the parts of the edifice they proposed to construct, but am limited to a mere report of such outlines as my memory may furnish, with the aid of the few fragments I have been able to recover. The considerate reader will accept this as an apology for the imperfect manner in which I must necessarily treat this part of my subject.
External commerce.
Such are the vicious habits we have contracted, such is the multiplicity of artificial wants we have inconsiderately created, that it is to be presumed there would still be a necessity to draw from foreign countries some of the more important commodities that France does not produce; at all events, it would have been necessary to send abroad for those which the medical profession derives, more or less, from all climes. The people being sole proprietor of all wealth, it belongs only to the people to treat with foreigners for the mutual exchange of superfluities. Besides, a traffic of this kind could not be entrusted to other than responsible magistrates, without retailing into the evils inseparable from private or individual property, and exposing the state to a new corruption. It
