The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they call a Constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it.  You cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying the debility of the Assembly.  You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities.  The military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy.  I wish everybody carefully to peruse the eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de La Tour du Pin.  He attributes the salvation of the municipalities to the good behavior of some of the troops.  These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of the municipalities, which is confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worst disposed, which is the strongest.  But the municipalities affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are necessary for their protection.  Indeed, they must command them or court them.  The municipalities, by the necessity of their situation, and by the republican powers they have obtained, must, with relation to the military, be the masters, or the servants, or the confederates, or each successively, or they must make a jumble of all together, according to circumstances.  What government is there to coerce the army but the municipality, or the municipality but the army?  To preserve concord where authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the Assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves; and they hope to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy by giving it a debauched interest in the municipal.

If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs, cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part.  With them will be their habits, affections, and sympathies.  The military conspiracies which are to be remedied by civic confederacies, the rebellious municipalities which are to be rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing the very armies of the state that are to keep them in order,—­all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the confusion from which they have arisen.  There must be blood.  The want of common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities, will make it flow.  Disorders may be quieted in one time and in one part.  They will break out in others; because the evil is radical and intrinsic.  All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken still more and more the military connection of soldiers with their officers, as well as add military and mutinous audacity to turbulent artificers and peasants.