Historical voices

As the colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them.

In what chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able to read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their commerce monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others?

Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government.

All your resolutions, all your proceedings, all your debates, all the works of your doctors in religion and politics, have industriously been put into their hands; and you expect that they will apply to their own case just as much of your…

They have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system, depends.

But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master,--the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

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 to have only a continuance of two years.

The army will not long look to an Assembly acting through the organ of false show and palpable imposition.

They must be constrained (and their inclinations lead them to what their necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority.

If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing.

Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power.

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.

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…

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.

What government is there to coerce the army but the municipality, or the municipality but the army?

The military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy.

Every man has his own relish; but I think, if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age.

Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind.

It is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men with arms in their hands are likely to learn.

The moment that, erecting itself into a deliberate body, it shall act according to its own resolutions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy: a species of political monster which has…

The nature of things requires that the army should never act but as an instrument.

You have got the wolf by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you are well circumstanced for a free deliberation relatively to that army, or to anything else.

However, to be subject to the pleasure of that Assembly is not to be subject to law, either for protection or for constraint.

These administrative bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through democracy to oligarchy.