Another of the schemes suggested by Mr. Burke was to purge the kingdom of all the troops which had been corrupted from their allegiance by the intrigues growing out of the first meeting of the Notables.  He proposed that they should sail at the same time, or nearly so, to be colonized in the different French islands and Madagascar; and, in their place, a new national guard created, who should be bound to the interest of the legitimate Government by receiving the waste crown lands to be shared among them, from the common soldier to its generals and Field-marshals.  Thus would the whole mass of rebellious blood have been reformed.  To ensure an effectual change, Mr. Burke advised the enrolment, in rotation, of sixty thousand Irish troops, twenty thousand always to remain in France, and forty thousand in reversion for the same service.  The lynx-eyed statesman saw clearly, from the murders of the Marquis de Launay and M. Flesselles, and from the destruction of the Bastille, and of the ramparts of Paris, that party had not armed itself against Louis, but against the throne.  It was therefore necessary to produce a permanent revolution in the army.

[Mr. Burke was too great a statesman not to be the friend of his country’s interest.  He also saw that, from the destruction of the monarchy in France, England had more to fear than to gain.  He well knew that the French Revolution was not, like that of the Americans, founded on grievances and urged in support of a great and disinterested principle.  He was aware that so restless a people, when they had overthrown the monarchy, would not limit the overthrow to their own country.  After Mr. Burke’s death, Mr. Fox was applied to, and was decidedly of the same opinion.  Mr. Sheridan was interrogated, and, at the request of the Princesse de Lamballe, he presented, for the Queen’s inspection, plans nearly equal to those of the above two great statesmen; and what is most singular and scarcely credible is that one and all of the opposition party in England strenuously exerted themselves for the upholding of the monarchy in France.  Many circumstances which came to my knowledge before and after the death of Louis XVI. prove that Mr. Pitt himself was averse to the republican principles being organized so near a constitutional monarchy as France was to Great Britain.  Though the conduct of the Duc d’Orleans was generally reprobated, I firmly believe that if he had possessed sufficient courage to have usurped the crown and re-established the monarchy, he would have been treated with in preference to the republicans.  I am the more confirmed in this opinion by a conversation between the Princesse de Lamballe and Mirabeau, in which he said a republic in France would never thrive.]