Having found the advantage of assassination in the formation of their tyranny, it is the grand resource in which they trust for the support of it.  Whoever opposes any of their proceedings, or is suspected of a design to oppose them, is to answer it with his life, or the lives of his wife and children.  This infamous, cruel, and cowardly practice of assassination they have the impudence to call merciful.  They boast that they operated their usurpation rather by terror than by force, and that a few seasonable murders have prevented the bloodshed of many battles.  There is no doubt they will extend these acts of mercy whenever they see an occasion.  Dreadful, however, will be the consequences of their attempt to avoid the evils of war by the merciful policy of murder.  If, by effectual punishment of the guilty, they do not wholly disavow that practice, and the threat of it too, as any part of their policy, if ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as into a country of assassins.  The mode of civilized war will not be practised:  nor are the French who act on the present system entitled to expect it.  They whose known policy it is to assassinate every citizen whom they suspect to be discontented by their tyranny, and to corrupt the soldiery of every open enemy, must look for no modified hostility.  All war, which is not battle, will be military execution.  This will beget acts of retaliation from you; and every retaliation will beget a new revenge.  The hell-hounds of war, on all sides, will be uncoupled and unmuzzled.  The new school of murder and barbarism set up in Paris, having destroyed (so far as in it lies) all the other manners and principles which have hitherto civilized Europe, will destroy also the mode of civilized war, which, more than anything else, has distinguished the Christian world.  Such is the approaching golden age which the Virgil[5] of your Assembly has sung to his Pollios!

In such a situation of your political, your civil, and your social morals and manners, how can you be hurt by the freedom of any discussion?  Caution is for those who have something to lose.  What I have said, to justify myself in not apprehending any ill consequence from a free discussion of the absurd consequences which flow from the relation of the lawful king to the usurped Constitution, will apply to my vindication with regard to the exposure I have made of the state of the army under the same sophistic usurpation.  The present tyrants want no arguments to prove, what they must daily feel, that no good army can exist on their principles.  They are in no want of a monitor to suggest to them the policy of getting rid of the army, as well as of the king, whenever they are in a condition to effect that measure.  What hopes may be entertained of your army for the restoration of your liberties I know not.  At present, yielding obedience to the pretended orders of a king who, they are perfectly apprised, has no will, and who never can issue a mandate which is not intended, in the first operation, or in its certain consequences, for his own destruction, your army seems to make one of the principal links in the chain of that servitude of anarchy by which a cruel usurpation holds an undone people at once in bondage and confusion.