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. 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.