The army will
not long look to an assembly acting through the organ of false show
and palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience to
a prisoner. They will either despise a pageant, or they will pity a
captive king. This relation of your army to the crown will, if I am
not greatly mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics.
It is, besides, to be considered whether an assembly like yours,
even supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ
through which its orders were to pass, is fit for promoting the
obedience and discipline of an army. It is known that armies have
hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any
senate or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an
assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The
officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of
military men if they see with perfect submission and due admiration
the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a
new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose
military policy, and the genius of whose command (if they should
have any), must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the
weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all,
the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of
faction until some popular general, who understands the art of
conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of
command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.
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