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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