I see in more than one corps
the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken; the most unheard-of
pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise; the ordinances
without force; the chiefs without authority; the military chest and
the colors carried off; the authority of the king himself (risum
teneatis?) proudly defied; the officers despised, degraded,
threatened, driven away, and some of them prisoners in the midst of
their corps, dragging on a precarious life in the bosom of disgust and
humiliation. To fill up the measure of all these horrors, the
commandants of places have had their throats cut, under the eyes and
almost in the arms of their own soldiers.
These evils are great; but they are not the worst consequences
which may be produced by such military insurrections. Sooner or
later they may menace the nation itself. The nature of things requires
that the army should never act but as an instrument. The moment
that, erecting itself into a deliberative body, it shall act according
to its own resolutions, the government, be it what it may, will
immediately degenerate into a military democracy- a species of
political monster which has always ended by devouring those who have
produced it.
After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular
consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the
common soldiers and non-commissioned officers without the knowledge,
or even in contempt of the authority, of their superiors, although the
presence and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to
such monstrous democratic assemblies (comices).
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