leagues from the frontiers, by land or sea, the preceding declaration to be made to the nearest office of customs, and the goods deposited in magazines appointed for the purpose. VIII. After the expiration of the period fixed to make the declara. tion, the officers of the customs, accompanied by a municipal admi. nistrator, may visit the houses sus. pected to contain or conceal articles fabricated in England. Visits during the day may also be made by the proper officers, to discover whe ther any articles prohibited by this decree are concealed in magazines; and if any such are found, the whole house of the owner of the magazine may be searched. IX. All military corps stationed on the frontiers, and all public functionaries, are enjoined to stop any article of English manufacture found on the territory of the republic. X. Violations of this decree to be punished with arrest (the criminal to be brought before the tribunal of correctional police) and confiscation of the goods, vessels, carriages, horses, and beasts of burden; and the delinquent, besides, to be condemned to pay not less than double the value of the object seized; and imprison. ment for a period not less than five days, nor more than three months. In case of a repetition of the of fence the fine to be double, and the imprisonment for the space of six months. XI. The value of the goods con fiscated shall be given as a reward to the seizers, or to those who have assisted in the arrest. A sixth of the confiscation is granted as an indemnity to the VOL. XXXVIII. municipal administrators and com. missioners of the executive directory, in all cases where their presence is appointed by the law. XII. Of English manufacture are considered all goods, whether directly brought from England, or coming indirectly from other countries. 1. All kinds of cloth and stuffs of wool and cotton, or mixtures of these materials; tamboured nan. keens, muslins, striped woollen and cotton cloths, and English tapestry. 2. All kinds of cotton or wool. len caps, simple or mixed. all 3. Buttons of every kind. 4. All kinds of metal; wrought iron, cutlery, clock-work, steel, copper, tin, white iron, polished or rough, pure or mixed. 5. Tanned leather, dressed hides, or plain for carriages or boots, harness, and all sadlery wares. 6. Ribband, hats, gauzes, known as English wares. 7. All kinds of skins for gloves or breeches, and these articles in a manufactured state. 8. All kinds of glass and crystal, except vases of glass used in chy mistry, and glasses for spectacles and watches. 9. Refined sugars. 10. All kinds of pottery known by the name of pipe.clay. XIII. The refined sugars com. prehended in the preceding article actually in the interior, are not subject to these declarations, and to be lodged in the maga. zines according to the preceding articles. XIV. All the objects of foreign manufacture different from those pointed out in Article XII. of which the import is not prohibited by former laws, shall not be adS mitted mitted unless accompanied with certificates, that they are the produce of countries, at peace with France. ...XV. Certificates shall be delivered by the French consuls, or by the public offices; they shall contain a formal attestation that the articles have been manufactured in the said country, and shall mention the name of the artist. XVI. In addition to the penal ties above pronounced, the names, sirnames, ages, professions, and places of abode of the violators of the law and of their agents, shall by the special interference of the minister of the interior, be stuck up in all public places, and inserted in the periodical papers, under the general title of brokers of Eng. land, destroyers of French industry. For this purpose the commissioners of the executive directory, with the tribunals of correctional police, shall be bound to send to the minister of the interior the names, sirnames, ages, professions, and places of abode, of all those against whom they shall have pronounced sentence in conformity to the pre sent law. XVII. All the regulations of the former laws, contrary to the present, are repealed. The above resolutions were af terwards sanctioned by the council of ancients. Message of the Executive Directory to the Council of Five Hundred. 20 Frimaire, Dec. 10. THE multiplied wants of the republic call imperiously upon you to display and employ all her resources. You are not ignorant, that every branch of the public service experiences the utmost dis. tress. The pay of the troops remains unsettled; the defenders of the country suffer all the horrors of nakedness; their courage is decreased by the painful sense of their wants; the disgust arising from them naturally occasions desertion; the hospitals are in want of fuel, medicines, and all other necessaries; the public alms and workhouses experience the same want, and for this reason they rejet the needy and infirm citizens, who usually furd an asylum in them. The creditors of the state, the contractors, who daily supply the wants of the armies, with great difficulty obtain only a small part of the sums due to them, and the distress which they experience on this account deters others who might supply these wants with more exactness, and on terms more advantageous for the republic. The public roads are impassable, and the communications interrupted. The salaries of the public functionaries remain unpaid. From one end of the republic to the other, the judges and administra. tors are reduced to the dreadful dilemma, either to expose them. selves and their families to the utmost misery, or disgracefully to sell themselves to intriguers. The disaffected agitate every part of the republic; murder and assassination are organized in many places, and the administration of police, without activity and with. out force from want of provisionary means, is unable to check these dis orders. It is in your power to make this afflictive picture disappear; you can diffuse new life through all the parts of the public administra tion, and re-establish the social harmony, the springs of which are impeded, but not destroyed. An important work, a simple work, but which tends directly to the end which you will wish to propose to yourselves, has already been presented to you on this sub. ject, and you have adopted it. Wise principles, equitable bases, have been submitted to you for the establishment of contributions, and means sufficient to provide for the ordinary and extraordinary expences, which the consolidation of the republic and the happiness of the people require. But until the laws which you are to lay down on those bases are enacted, until the reimbursements are in activity, until by a certainty of receipts the necessary order can be established for giving an invariable application to every branch of the public revenue; waiting the happy instant which is near, if you choose, you ought by a provisional resource to foster and re animate all; you must restore motion to the divers departments of administration, which all hold together, and second each other, and which it becomes indispensable to extri cate from the dangerous state of decline in which they are plunged. (Here the directory points out the employments of the arrears due upon the last fourth part of the national domains sold by the law of the 28th Ventose, as the means of obtaining that desirable end every purchaser of national domains, by virtue of the said law, who has not paid the whole amount of his purchase, is to pay the same in bills payable to order, and in ready specie, ten days after the pro mulgation of a law to be passed for the purpose, in his department; those sums are to be paid at the expiration of each term of payment stipulated, unless the purchaser will come forward sooner with his pay ments, and thus benefit his capital by receiving interest. The bills or securities are to be mortgaged upon the property bought by the purchaser, who, in case of default, is to suffer forfeiture; the estate is, of course, to be put up to sale by auction. If any administration neg lects to enforce this payment, by putting up the estate to sale, its members are to be personally re sponsible. The bills thus issued by the purchasers of national domains as aforesaid, are not to have any forcible circulation, but they are to pass by confidence, at the responsibility of the drawers and endorsers, for metallic specie, their actual and natural value being mortgaged and secured upon the value of the estates in payment of which they were issued). BARRAS, President: it. It is by submission to the law that you are to find your liberty secured, the destruction of faction accomplished, and the conclusion of your miseries. Profit at length by the lessons of experience; let the sources of division among you, which have been the spring of all your miseries, be dried up; and the spirit of party, which has been ever the forge in which your fetters have been formed, give place to the bonds of fraternity; and, above all things, let what has passed teach you not to give credit to men, unless when they speak the language of principle; and let him, who would hereafter substitute his will for law, be considered as a traitor, and abandoned to the vengeance of free men. It was a boundless confidence reposed in one of your fellow-citizens, who was far from deserving it, that misled you so much as to cause you to betray your dearest interests, to detach yourself from your mother-country, not only at the moment when she was bestow. ing on you the estimable boon of liberty, but while she was lavishing her treasures for the increase of your industry, for the formation of your havens, and for the cultiva tion of your fields. It was a blind obedience to the will of a mean, ambitious man, that led you to the commission of the most atroci. ous crime that republicans could commit, that of submitting to a king. Citizens, you have great crimes, for which you should make reparation. The stigma with which you are branded can only be done away by a conduct such as to justify the generosity with which the French republic has treated you, in restor ing you to the plenitude of your rights. May you make such use of this indulgence, as is worthy of men who wish for freedom, withont acquiring it by the horrors of anarchy! who are disposed to submit, without meanness, to the laws, and to acknowledge no other authority than that which may emanate from the republic. The fatal error, of which during three years you have been the victims, should instruct you how far you ought to give credit to the pro. fession of those who are the enc. mies of the republic. The English could not prevail on you to betray your duty but by a promise to preserve your liberty; and yet, while they loaded you with contempt, they plunged you in slavery. They were bound to have prevented crimes by the punishment of those who committed them; yet they encouraged every wickedness, by giving impunity to assassins. They had sworn to defend you against the French, whose just indignation you had provoked; yet, when their interest called them elsewhere, they abandoned you to the mercy of the republic, which you had mistrusted. What a contrast does the gene. rous conduct of republicans form to that of their enemies! They return to you with the olive-branch of peace in their hands-they forget the injuries which they have suf fered and if ever the recollection of them crosses their minds, it is only when they are anxious to caution you against new errors, by which new attempts may be made to seduce you from your duty. Let not those days of horror and of calamity pass from before your sight, in which the general council of the department lighted the torch of civil war, and reared the stand ard of rebellion in the soi-disant as sembly of Corsica. If you had then been commanded by energetic pa. triots, they would, by enlightening the people, have neutralized the influence of the traitor, who, while preaching liberty, sought only the means of enslaving you; and, if the administrators had then done their dury, they would have prevented those evils which have been the necessary result of this first act of rebellion, and you would not now have had occasion to blush at those disastrous events which have been the consequence of the errors into which by degrees you were mis led. The constitution insured to you not only the free exercise of your civil and political rights, but also that of religion, which has been so strangely abused for the purpose of deceiving you. The English had become the friends, the protectors of the pope; thus men without probity, and without virtue, de plored the decay of religion, and the cry of impiety was raised by those whose days were numbered only by the crimes they had committed, and by the immoral actions which disgraced them. Ye ministers of religion! the constitution secures to you the free. dom of worship; the government respects those who profess the doc. trines of the gospel; and the consciences of citizens are a sacred asylum into which the eye of its agents does not penetrate: but those who would preach discord in the name of the God of peace; those who would abuse the sacred mini. stry which they are called to fill, and who would corrupt public opi nion by the poison of fanaticism; such are men to whom the rigour of republican laws extends its severest punishments--a rigour enjoined both by policy and by respect for religion. Ye numerous patriots, who during three years have groaned under the rod of those proud masters to whom you were sold, while you sighed for the moment in which you might take up arms to vindicate your rights; and above all, ye who, to secure the happiness of your country, have preferred exile to the shame of obeying a king; whose generons devotion to the ser vice of your country has overcome all obstacles, has endured all wants, and has braved all dangers-it is your's to give the first example of civic virtue. At the approach of the arms of the republic, those traitors, who had been most guilty, disappeared; no longer would they tread the ground they had sought to dishonour, without finding death at hand; and should any be found to remain in the country, the law will speedily overtake them; but in others it behoves you to see mistaken brethren, who, returning to their right reason, will merit by republican conduct your virtue and your esteem. Be united; forget your divisions, and unanimously swear on the altar of your country, and by the manes of your compa nions in danger and in glory, who died in battle in defence of the re public, eternal hatred to royalty. Given at Bastia, the 24th of Nov. 5th year of the republic, one and indivisible. |