[Sidenote: No individual influence, civil or military.]
I take the state of France to be totally different. I know of no such
body, and of no such party. So far from a combination of twenty men,
(always excepting Poitou,) I never yet heard that _a single man_ could
be named of sufficient force or influence to answer for another man,
much less for the smallest district in the country, or for the most
incomplete company of soldiers in the army. We see every man that the
Jacobins choose to apprehend taken up in his village or in his house,
and conveyed to prison without the least shadow of resistance,--_and
this indifferently_, whether he is suspected of Royalism, or Federalism,
Moderantism, Democracy Royal, or any other of the names of faction which
they start by the hour. What is much more astonishing, (and, if we did
not carefully attend to the genius and circumstances of this Revolution,
must indeed appear incredible,) all their most accredited military men,
from a generalissimo to a corporal, may be arrested, (each in the midst
of his camp, and covered with the laurels of accumulated victories,)
tied neck and heels, thrown into a cart, and sent to Paris to be
disposed of at the pleasure of the Revolutionary tribunals.
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