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. To secure a real army, the officer should
be first and last in the eye of the soldier; first and last in his
attention, observance, and esteem. Officers it seems there are to
be, whose chief qualification must be temper and patience.
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