tice above all, stop short clearly on this side of
the rebounding-point! Soldiers, as we often say, do revolt: were it not
so, several things which are transient in this world might be perennial.

Over and above the general quarrel which all sons of Adam maintain
with their lot here below, the grievances of the French soldiery reduce
themselves to two, First that their Officers are Aristocrats; secondly
that they cheat them of their Pay. Two grievances; or rather we might
say one, capable of becoming a hundred; for in that single first
proposition, that the Officers are Aristocrats, what a multitude of
corollaries lie ready! It is a bottomless ever-flowing fountain of
grievances this; what you may call a general raw-material of grievance,
wherefrom individual grievance after grievance will daily body itself
forth. Nay there will even be a kind of comfort in getting it, from
time to time, so embodied. Peculation of one's Pay! It is embodied; made
tangible, made denounceable; exhalable, if only in angry words.

For unluckily that grand fountain of grievances does exist: Aristocrats
almost all our Officers necessarily are; they have it in the blood and
bone. By the law of the case, no man can pretend to be the pitifullest
lieutenant of militia, till he have first verified, to the satisfaction
of the Lion-King, a Nobility of four generations. Not Nobility only,
but four generations of it: this latter is the improvement hit upon,
in comparatively late years, by a certain War-minister much pressed for
commissions. (Dampmartin, Evenemens, i. 89.) An improvement which did
relieve the over-pressed War-minister, but which split France still
further into yawning contrasts of Commonalty and Nobility, nay of new
Nobility and old; as if already with your new and old, and then with
your old, older and oldest, there were not contrasts and discrepancies
enough;--the general clash whereof men now see and hear, and in the
singular whirlpool, all contrasts gone together to the bottom! Gone to
the bottom or going; with uproar, without return; going every where save
in the Military section of things; and there, it may be asked, can they
hope to continue always at the top? Apparently, not.

It is true, in a time of external Peace, when there is no fighting but
only drilling, this question, How you rise from the ranks, may seem
theoretical rather. But in reference to the Rights of Man it is
continually practical. The soldier has sworn to be f