These new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong
resemblance to that sort of military colonies which Tacitus has
observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and wiser
days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were
careful to make the elements of methodical subordination and
settlement to be coeval, and even to lay the foundations of civil
discipline in the military.* But when all the good arts had fallen
into ruin, they proceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of
men, and with as little judgment and as little care for those things
which make a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as well as
almost every instance, your new commonwealth is born and bred and
fed in those corruptions which mark degenerated and worn-out
republics. Your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death:
the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its physiognomy, and
the prognostic of its fate.
* Non, ut olim, universae legiones deducebantur cum tribunis, et
centurionibus, et sui cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et
caritate rempublicam afficerent; sed ignoti inter se, diversis
manipulis, sine rectore, sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio
genere mortalium, repente in unum collecti, numerus magis quam
colonia. Tac. Annal. 1. 14, sect. 27. All this will be still more
applicable to the unconnected, rotatory, biennial national assemblies,
in this absurd and senseless constitution.
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