-How
the soldier is treated.

Against universal sedition where is force?--The measures and
dispositions which govern the 150,000 men who maintain order are the
same as those ruling the 26 millions people subject to it. We find here
the same abuses, disaffection, and other causes for the dissolution of
the nation which, in their turn, will dissolve the army.

Of the 90 millions of pay[5401] which the army annually costs the
treasury, 46 millions are for officers and only 44 millions for
soldiers, and we are already aware that a new ordinance reserves ranks
of all kinds for verified nobles. In no direction is this inequality,
against which public opinion rebels so vigorously, more apparent. On
the one hand, authority, honors, money, leisure, good-living, social
enjoyments, and plays in private, for the minority. On the other hand,
for the majority, subjection, dejection, fatigue, a forced or betrayed
enlistment, no hope of promotion, pay at six sous a day,[5402] a narrow
cot for two, bread fit for dogs, and, for several years, kicks like
those bestowed on a dog.[5403] On the one hand, a nobility of high
estate, and, on the other, the lowest of the populace. One might
say that this was specially designed for contrast and to intensify
irritation. "The insignificant pay of the soldier," says an economist,
"the way in which he is dressed, lodged and fed, his utter dependence,
would render it cruelty to take any other than a man of the lower
class."[5404] Indeed, he is sought for only in the lowest layers
of society. Not only are nobles and the bourgeoisie exempt from
conscription, but again the employees of the administration, of the
fermes and of public works, "all gamekeepers and forest-rangers,
the hired domestics and valets of ecclesiastics, of communities, of
religious establishments, of the gentry and of nobles,"[5405] and even
of the bourgeoisie living in grand style, and still better, the sons
of cultivators in easy circumstances, and, in general, all possessing
influence or any species of protector. There remains, accordingly, for
the militia none but the poorest class, and they do not willingly
enter it. On the contrary, the service is hateful to them; they conceal
themselves in the forests where they have to be pursued by armed men:
in a certain canton which, three years later, furnishes in one day from
fifty to one hundred volunteers, the young men cut off their thumbs to
escape the draft.[5406] To this scu