What
constant care is taken in this country to remind the military that they
are under the restraint of civil power! In America their superiority is
felt still more. Remove the check of the law, as this bill proposes, and
what insolence, what outrage, may you not expect! Every passion that
is pernicious to society will be let loose on a people unaccustomed
to licentiousness and intemperance. The colonists, who have been long
complaining of oppression, will see in the soldiery those who are to
enforce it on them; while the military, strongly prepossessed against
the people as rebellious, unawed by the civil power, and actuated by
that arbitrary spirit which prevails in the best troops, will commit
violences that might rouse the tamest people to resistance, and which
the vigilance of their officers cannot effectually restrain. The
inevitable consequences will be open rebellion, which you profess by
this act to obviate. I have been bred a soldier; I have served long; I
respect the profession, and live in the strictest habits of friendship
with many officers; but no country gentleman in this house looks on
the army with a more jealous eye, or would more strenuously resist the
setting them above the control of civil power. No man is to be trusted
in such a situation. It is not the fault of the soldier, but the vice of
human nature, which, unbridled by law, becomes insolent and licentious,
wantonly violating the peace of society, and trampling upon the rights
of human kind.
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