it is impossible to form a direct judgment upon it.  However, if great care is not taken to form it in a spirit very different from that which has guided them in their proceedings relative to state offences, this tribunal, subservient to their inquisition, the Committee of Research, will extinguish the last sparks of liberty in France, and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation.  If they wish to give to this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not evoke from or send to it the causes relative to their own members, at their pleasure.  They must also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of Paris.[126]

Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judicature?  The able arrangement of this part is the more difficult, and requires the greater skill and attention, not only as a great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing principle in the new body of republics which you call the French nation.  Truly, it is not easy to divine what that army may become at last.  You have voted a very large one, and on good appointments, at least fully equal to your apparent means of payment.  But what is the principle of its discipline? or whom is it to obey?  You have got the wolf by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you are well circumstanced for a free deliberation relatively to that army, or to anything else.

The minister and secretary of state for the War Department is M. de La Tour du Pin.  This gentleman, like his colleagues in administration, is a most zealous assertor of the Revolution, and a sanguine admirer of the new Constitution which originated in that event.  His statement of facts relative to the military of France is important, not only from his official and personal authority, but because it displays very clearly the actual condition of the army in France, and because it throws light on the principles upon which the Assembly proceeds in the administration of this critical object.  It may enable us to form some judgment how far it may be expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of France.

M. de La Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes to give an account of the state of his department, as it exists under the auspices of the National Assembly.  No man knows it so well; no man can express it better.  Addressing himself to the National Assembly, he says,—­

“His Majesty has this day sent me to apprise you of the multiplied disorders of which every day he receives the most distressing intelligence.  The army [le corps militaire] threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy.  Entire regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order established by your decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the most awful solemnity.  Compelled by my duty to give you information of these excesses, my heart bleeds, when I consider who they are that have committed them.  Those against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to this day have been so full of honor and loyalty, and with whom for fifty years I have lived the comrade and the friend.