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Paris as It Was and as It Is by Francis W. Blagdon
page 39 of 884 (04%)
_alarmists_. The factious themselves, in short, were alternately
proscribed, as soon as they ceased to belong to the ruling faction.

In this state of things, society became a prey to the most baneful
passions. Mistrust entered every heart; friendship had no attraction;
relationship, no tie; and men's minds, hardened by the habit of
misfortune, or overwhelmed by fear, no longer opened to pity.

Terror compressed every imagination; and the revolutionary
government, exercising it to its fullest extent, struck off a
prodigious number of heads, filled the prisons with victims, and
continued to corrupt the morals of the nation by staining it with
crimes.

But all things have an end. The tyrants fell; the dungeons were
thrown open; numberless victims emerged from them; and France seemed
to recover new life; but still bewildered by the _revolutionary
spirit_, wasted by the concealed poison of anarchy, exhausted by her
innumerable sacrifices, and almost paralyzed by her own convulsions,
she made but impotent efforts for the enjoyment of liberty and
justice. Taxes became more burdensome; commerce was annihilated;
industry, without aliment; paper-money, without value; and specie,
without circulation. However, while the French nation was degraded at
home by this series of evils, it was respected abroad through the
rare merit of some of its generals, the splendour of its victories,
and the bravery of its soldiers.

During these transactions, there was formed in the public mind that
moral resistance which destroys not governments by violence, but
undermines them. The intestine commotions were increasing; the
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