-upon the credit of which, one of their doctors has thought
fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the Assembly
not to attend to old men, or to any persons who value themselves upon
their experience. I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify, and
take this test,--wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience
and observation. Every man has his own relish; but I think, if I could
not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the
stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in
regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to
be regenerated by them,--nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall
in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental
sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] _Si isti mihi largiantur ut
repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!_

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they
call a Constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter
insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in
contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot
propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying
the debility of the Assembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of
the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the
armed municipalities. The military lays open the civil, and the civil
betrays the military anarchy. I wish everybody carefully to peruse the
eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de La Tour du Pin. He attributes
the salvation of the municipalities to the good behavior of some of the
troops. These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of the
municipalities, which is confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage
of the worst disposed, which is the strongest. But the municipalities
affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are necessary
for their protection. Indeed, they must command them or court them. The
municipalities, by the necessity of their situation, and by the
republican powers they have obtained, must, with relation to the
military, be the masters, or the servants, or the confederates, or each
successively, or they must make a jumble of all together, according to
circumstances. What government is there to coerce the army but the
municipality, or the municipality but the army? To preserve concord
where authority is extinguished, at the