destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as
far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore
the moment any difference arises between your National Assembly and any
part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is
left to you,--or rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. You
see, by the report of your war minister, that the distribution of the
army is in a great measure made with a view of internal coercion.[129]
You must rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by which
you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which
after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make of it. The
king is to call out troops to act against his people, when the world has
been told, and the assertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops
ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies assert to themselves an
independent constitution and a free trade. They must be constrained by
troops. In what chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able
to read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their commerce
monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others? As the colonists
rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again,--massacre, torture,
hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of
metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted! It was
but the other day that the farmers of land in one of your provinces
refused to pay some sorts of rents to the lord of the soil. In
consequence of this, you decree that the country-people shall pay all
rents and dues, except those which as grievances you have abolished; and
if they refuse, then you order the king to march troops against them.
You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences,
and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. The leaders of the
present system tell them of their rights, as men, to take fortresses, to
murder guards, to seize on kings without the least appearance of
authority even from the Assembly, whilst, as the sovereign legislative
body, that Assembly was sitting in the name of the nation; and yet these
leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in these very
disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the principles and follow
the examples which have been guarantied by their own approbation.

The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feodality as the
barbarism of tyranny