They are to
manage their troops by electioneering arts. They must bear
themselves as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means
power may be occasionally in their hands, the authority by which
they are to be nominated becomes of high importance.
What you may do finally does not appear, nor is it of much
moment whilst the strange and contradictory relation between your army
and all the parts of your republic, as well as the puzzled relation of
those parts to each other and to the whole, remain as they are. You
seem to have given the provisional nomination of the officers in the
first instance to the king, with a reserve of approbation by the
National Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely
sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. They must soon
perceive that those who can negative indefinitely in reality
appoint. The officers must, therefore, look to their intrigues in that
Assembly as the sole certain road to promotion. Still, however, by
your new constitution they must begin their solicitation at court.
This double negotiation for military rank seems to me a contrivance as
well adapted, as if it were studied for no other end, to promote
faction in the Assembly itself, relative to this vast military
patronage, and then to poison the corps of officers with factions of a
nature still more dangerous to the safety of government, upon any
bottom on which it can be placed, and destructive in the end to the
efficiency of the army itself.
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