France.

He knew too well, and he felt as much as any man, how difficult it was
to accommodate a standing army to a free constitution, or to any
constitution. An armed disciplined body is, in its essence, dangerous to
liberty; undisciplined, it is ruinous to society. Its component parts
are in the latter case neither good citizens nor good soldiers. What
have they thought of in France, under such a difficulty as almost puts
the human faculties to a stand? They have put their army under such a
variety of principles of duty, that it is more likely to breed
litigants, pettifoggers, and mutineers than soldiers.[76] They have set
up, to balance their crown army, another army, deriving under another
authority, called a municipal army,--a balance of armies, not of orders.
These latter they have destroyed with every mark of insult and
oppression. States may, and they will best, exist with a partition of
civil powers. Armies cannot exist under a divided command. This state of
things he thought in effect a state of war, or at best but a truce,
instead of peace, in the country.

What a dreadful thing is a standing army for the conduct of the whole or
any part of which no man is responsible! In the present state of the
French crown army, is the crown responsible for the whole of it? Is
there any general who can be responsible for the obedience of a
brigade, any colonel for that of a regiment, any captain for that of a
company? And as to the municipal army, reinforced as it is by the new
citizen deserters, under whose command are they? Have we not seen them,
not led by, but dragging, their nominal commander, with a rope about his
neck, when they, or those whom they accompanied, proceeded to the most
atrocious acts of treason and murder? Are any of these armies? Are any
of these citizens?

We have in such a difficulty as that of fitting a standing army to the
state, he conceived, done much better. We have not distracted our army
by divided principles of obedience. We have put them under a single
authority, with a simple (our common) oath of fidelity; and we keep the
whole under our annual inspection. This was doing all that could be
safely done.

He felt some concern that this strange thing called a Revolution in
France should be compared with the glorious event commonly called the
Revolution in England, and the conduct of the soldiery on that occasion
compared with the behavior of some of the troops of France in the
present in