her an Assembly like yours, even
supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ, through
which its orders were to pass, is fit for promoting the obedience and
discipline of an army. It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a
very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular
authority; and they will least of all yield it to an Assembly which is
to have only a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose
the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect
submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders,--especially when
they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of
those pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose command,
(if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is
transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the
fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time
mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who
understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the
true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.
Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of
securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in
which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army
is your master,--the master (that is little) of your king, the master of
your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

How came the Assembly by their present power over the army? Chiefly, to
be sure, by debauching the soldiers from their officers. They have begun
by a most terrible operation. They have touched the central point about
which the particles that compose armies are at repose. They have
destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical
link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of
military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system,
depends. The soldier is told he is a citizen, and has the rights of man
and citizen. The right of a man, he is told, is, to be his own governor,
and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-government.
It is very natural he should think that he ought most of all to have his
choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience. He will
therefore, in all probability, systematically do what he does at present
occasionally: that is, he will exercise at least a ne