he character of citizen and
soldier. But as applied to the events which had happened in France,
where the abstract principle was clothed with its circumstances, he
thought that his friend would agree with him, that what was done there
furnished no matter of exultation, either in the act or the example.
These soldiers were not citizens, but base, hireling mutineers, and
mercenary, sordid deserters, wholly destitute of any honorable
principle. Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchic spirit
from the evils of which a democracy itself was to be resorted to, by
those who were the least disposed to that form, as a sort of refuge. It
was not an army in corps and with discipline, and embodied under the
respectable patriot citizens of the state in resisting tyranny. Nothing
like it. It was the case of common soldiers deserting from their
officers, to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to
a cause the real object of which was to level all those institutions,
and to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and
hold together the community by a chain of subordination: to raise
soldiers against their officers, servants against their masters,
tradesmen against their customers, artificers against their employers,
tenants against their landlords, curates against their bishops, and
children against their parents. That this cause of theirs was not an
enemy to servitude, but to society.

He wished the House to consider how the members would like to have their
mansions pulled down and pillaged, their persons abused, insulted, and
destroyed, their title-deeds brought out and burned before their faces,
and themselves and their families driven to seek refuge in every nation
throughout Europe, for no other reason than this, that, without any
fault of theirs, they were born gentlemen and men of property, and were
suspected of a desire to preserve their consideration and their estates.
The desertion in France was to aid an abominable sedition, the very
professed principle of which was an implacable hostility to nobility and
gentry, and whose savage war-whoop was, _"A l'Aristocrate!"_--by which
senseless, bloody cry they animated one another to rapine and murder;
whilst abetted by ambitious men of another class, they were crushing
everything respectable and virtuous in their nation, and to their power
disgracing almost every name by which we formerly knew there was such a
country in the world as