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 injustice 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