Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline by the free conversation of the soldiers with the municipal festive societies, which is thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may judge by the state of the municipalities themselves, furnished to us by the war minister in this very speech.  He conceives good hopes of the success of his endeavors towards restoring order for the present from the good disposition of certain regiments; but he finds something cloudy with regard to the future.  As to preventing the return of confusion, “for this the administration” (says he) “cannot be answerable to you, as long as they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an authority over the troops which your institutions have reserved wholly to the monarch.  You have fixed the limits of the military authority and the municipal authority.  You have bounded the action which you have permitted to the latter over the former to the right of requisition; but never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons in these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their guard, to stop them in their marches ordered by the king, or, in a word, to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities or even market-towns through which they are to pass.”

Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society which is to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true principles of military subordination, and to lender them machines in the hands of the supreme power of the country!  Such are the distempers of the French troops!  Such is their cure!  As the army is, so is the navy.  The municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the municipalities.  From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians.  Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years’ wear and tear amongst mankind.  They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all subjects,—­upon the credit of which, one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the Assembly not to attend to old men, or to any persons who value themselves upon their experience.  I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify, and take this test,—­wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation.  Every man has his own relish; but I think, if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age.  These gentlemen deal in regeneration:  but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,—­nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!