He wished the House to consider how the members would like to have their
mansions pulled down and pillaged, their persons abused, insulted, and
destroyed, their title-deeds brought out and burned before their faces,
and themselves and their families driven to seek refuge in every nation
throughout Europe, for no other reason than this, that, without any
fault of theirs, they were born gentlemen and men of property, and were
suspected of a desire to preserve their consideration and their estates.
The desertion in France was to aid an abominable sedition, the very
professed principle of which was an implacable hostility to nobility and
gentry, and whose savage war-whoop was, _"A l'Aristocrate!"_--by which
senseless, bloody cry they animated one another to rapine and murder;
whilst abetted by ambitious men of another class, they were crushing
everything respectable and virtuous in their nation, and to their power
disgracing almost every name by which we formerly knew there was such a
country in the world as 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.
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