“What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once led them astray?  Whilst you are indefatigable in establishing uniformity in the empire and moulding the whole into one coherent and consistent body, whilst the French are taught by you at once the respect which the laws owe to the rights of man and that which the citizens owe to the laws, the administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance and confusion.  I see in more than one corps the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken,—­the most unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise,—­the ordinances without force,—­the chiefs without authority,—­the military chest and the colors carried off,—­the authority of the king himself [risum teneatis] proudly defied,—­the officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven away, and some of them prisoners in the midst of their corps, dragging on a precarious life in the bosom of disgust and humiliation.  To fill up the measure of all these horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats out under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers.

“These evils are great; but they are not the worst consequences which may be produced by such military insurrections.  Sooner or later they may menace the nation itself. The nature of things requires that the army should never act but as an instrument.  The moment that, erecting itself into a deliberate body, it shall act according to its own resolutions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy:  a species of political monster which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.

“After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the common soldiers and non-commissioned officers, without the knowledge, or even in contempt of the authority, of their superiors?—­although the presence and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to such monstrous democratic assemblies [comices].”

It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture,—­finished as far as its canvas admits, but, as I apprehend, not taking in the whole of the nature and complexity of the disorders of this military democracy, which, the minister at war truly and wisely observes, wherever it exists, must be the true constitution of the state, by whatever formal appellation it may pass.  For, though he informs the Assembly that the more considerable part of the army have not cast off their obedience, but are still attached to their duty, yet those travellers who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best rather observe in them the absence of mutiny than the existence of discipline.