have set up, to balance their crown army, another army, deriving under another authority, called a municipal army,—­a balance of armies, not of orders.  These latter they have destroyed with every mark of insult and oppression.  States may, and they will best, exist with a partition of civil powers.  Armies cannot exist under a divided command.  This state of things he thought in effect a state of war, or at best but a truce, instead of peace, in the country.

What a dreadful thing is a standing army for the conduct of the whole or any part of which no man is responsible!  In the present state of the French crown army, is the crown responsible for the whole of it?  Is there any general who can be responsible for the obedience of a brigade, any colonel for that of a regiment, any captain for that of a company?  And as to the municipal army, reinforced as it is by the new citizen deserters, under whose command are they?  Have we not seen them, not led by, but dragging, their nominal commander, with a rope about his neck, when they, or those whom they accompanied, proceeded to the most atrocious acts of treason and murder?  Are any of these armies?  Are any of these citizens?

We have in such a difficulty as that of fitting a standing army to the state, he conceived, done much better.  We have not distracted our army by divided principles of obedience.  We have put them under a single authority, with a simple (our common) oath of fidelity; and we keep the whole under our annual inspection.  This was doing all that could be safely done.

He felt some concern that this strange thing called a Revolution in France should be compared with the glorious event commonly called the Revolution in England, and the conduct of the soldiery on that occasion compared with the behavior of some of the troops of France in the present instance.  At that period, the Prince of Orange, a prince of the blood-royal in England, was called in by the flower of the English aristocracy to defend its ancient Constitution, and not to level all distinctions.  To this prince, so invited, the aristocratic leaders who commanded the troops went over with their several corps, in bodies, to the deliverer of their country.  Aristocratic leaders brought up the corps of citizens who newly enlisted in this cause.  Military obedience changed its object; but military discipline was not for a moment interrupted in its principle.  The troops were ready for war, but indisposed to mutiny.

But as the conduct of the English armies was different, so was that of the whole English nation at that time.  In truth, the circumstances of our Revolution (as it is called) and that of France are just the reverse of each other in almost every particular, and in the whole spirit of the transaction.  With us it was the case of a legal monarch attempting arbitrary power; in France it is the case of an arbitrary monarch beginning, from whatever cause, to legalize his authority.