an army to be.

Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline by the free
conversation of the soldiers with the municipal festive societies, which
is thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may
judge by the state of the municipalities themselves, furnished to us by
the war minister in this very speech. He conceives good hopes of the
success of his endeavors towards restoring order _for the present_ from
the good disposition of certain regiments; but he finds something cloudy
with regard to the future. As to preventing the return of confusion,
"for this the administration" (says he) "cannot be answerable to you, as
long as they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an authority
over the troops which your institutions have reserved wholly to the
monarch. You have fixed the limits of the military authority and the
municipal authority. You have bounded the action which you have
permitted to the latter over the former to the right of requisition; but
never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons
in these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give
orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their
guard, to stop them in their marches ordered by the king, or, in a word,
to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities or even
market-towns through which they are to pass."

Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society which is
to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true principles of
military subordination, and to lender them machines in the hands of the
supreme power of the country! Such are the distempers of the French
troops! Such is their cure! As the army is, so is the navy. The
municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the seamen in
their turn supersede the orders of the municipalities. From my heart I
pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war
minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic
cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of
these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions
coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They
seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in
politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a
certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all
subjects,-