real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority.  The authority of the Assembly itself suffers by passing through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen.  The army will not long look to an Assembly acting through the organ of false show and palpable imposition.  They will not seriously yield obedience to a prisoner.  They will either despise a pageant, or they will pity a captive king.  This relation of your army to the crown will, if I am not greatly mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics.

It is besides to be considered, whether an Assembly like yours, even supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ, through which its orders were to pass, is fit for promoting the obedience and discipline of an army.  It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an Assembly which is to have only a continuance of two years.  The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders,—­especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient.  In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.  Armies will obey him on his personal account.  There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.  But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master,—­the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

How came the Assembly by their present power over the army?  Chiefly, to be sure, by debauching the soldiers from their officers.  They have begun by a most terrible operation.  They have touched the central point about which the particles that compose armies are at repose.  They have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system, depends.  The soldier is told he is a citizen, and has the rights of man and citizen.  The right of a man, he is told, is, to be his own governor, and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-government.  It is very natural he should think that he ought most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience.  He will therefore, in all probability, systematically do what he does at present occasionally:  that is, he will exercise