hazard of all consequences, the
Assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves;
and they hope to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy by
giving it a debauched interest in the municipal.

If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs,
cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the
lowest and most desperate part. With them will be their habits,
affections, and sympathies. The military conspiracies which are to be
remedied by civic confederacies, the rebellious municipalities which are
to be rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing
the very armies of the state that are to keep them in order,--all these
chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the
confusion from which they have arisen. There must be blood. The want of
common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions
of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities,
will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in one time and in one
part. They will break out in others; because the evil is radical and
intrinsic. All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious
citizens must weaken still more and more the military connection of
soldiers with their officers, as well as add military and mutinous
audacity to turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army,
the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier,--first
and last in his attention, observance, and esteem. Officers, it seems,
there are to be, whose chief qualification must be temper and patience.
They are to manage their troops by electioneering arts. They must bear
themselves as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means power
may be occasionally in their hands, the authority by which they are to
be nominated becomes of high importance.

What you may do finally does not appear: nor is it of much moment,
whilst the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all
the parts of your republic, as well as the puzzled relation of those
parts to each other and to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to
have given the provisional nomination of the officers, in the first
instance, to the king, with a reserve of approbation by the National
Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in
discovering the true seat of power. They must soon perceive that those
who can negative indefini