, 1789 (in Hist. Parl. ii. 35), &c.) There are public petitions or
remonstrances, private emissaries and associations; there is discontent,
jealousy, uncertainty, sullen suspicious humour. The whole French Army,
fermenting in dark heat, glooms ominous, boding good to no one.

So that, in the general social dissolution and revolt, we are to have
this deepest and dismallest kind of it, a revolting soldiery? Barren,
desolate to look upon is this same business of revolt under all its
aspects; but how infinitely more so, when it takes the aspect of
military mutiny! The very implement of rule and restraint, whereby
all the rest was managed and held in order, has become precisely the
frightfullest immeasurable implement of misrule; like the element
of Fire, our indispensable all-ministering servant, when it gets the
mastery, and becomes conflagration. Discipline we called a kind of
miracle: in fact, is it not miraculous how one man moves hundreds of
thousands; each unit of whom it may be loves him not, and singly fears
him not, yet has to obey him, to go hither or go thither, to march and
halt, to give death, and even to receive it, as if a Fate had spoken;
and the word-of-command becomes, almost in the literal sense, a
magic-word?

Which magic-word, again, if it be once forgotten; the spell of it once
broken! The legions of assiduous ministering spirits rise on you now as
menacing fiends; your free orderly arena becomes a tumult-place of the
Nether Pit, and the hapless magician is rent limb from limb. Military
mobs are mobs with muskets in their hands; and also with death hanging
over their heads, for death is the penalty of disobedience and they
have disobeyed. And now if all mobs are properly frenzies, and work
frenetically with mad fits of hot and of cold, fierce rage alternating
so incoherently with panic terror, consider what your military mob
will be, with such a conflict of duties and penalties, whirled between
remorse and fury, and, for the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To
the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps pitiable;
and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be pitied. An
anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers! With a frankness,
which to the Moralist in these times seems surprising, they have sworn
to become machines; and nevertheless they are still partly men. Let no
prudent person in authority remind them of this latter fact; but always
let force, let injus