From this it appears, that the Prussian army is neither more nor less than a standing militia, embodied for two or three months every year, and then dispersed to their usual labours as farmers.
I think this decides our old dispute on the subject of standing armies and militia. I expert therefore that you will, by the return of post, fairly and candidly acknowledge that I was in the right, and that all your arguments to prove, that a militia could not be depended on in the time of actual service, are built on false principles, and that my opinion was just and well-founded.
Before closing this letter, I will inform you of a very singular incident, the circumstances of which I relate, not so much with a design to illustrate the character or sentiments of the vulgar of this place in particular, as to furnish you with a curious fact in the history of human nature in general.
I went a few days since with Mr. F—— to see a man executed for the murder of a child.—His motives for this horrid deed were much more extraordinary than the action itself. He had accompanied some of his companions to the house of a fellow, who assumed the character of a fortune-teller, and having disobliged him, by expressing a contempt of his art, the fellow, out of revenge, prophesied, that this man should die on a scaffold.—This seemed to make little impression at the time, but afterwards recurred often to this unhappy creature’s memory, and became every day more troublesome to his imagination. At length the idea haunted his mind so incessantly, that he was rendered perfectly miserable, and could no longer endure life.
He would have put himself to death with his own hands, had he not been deterred by the notion, that God Almighty never forgave suicide; though, upon repentance, he is very ready to pardon every other crime. He resolved, therefore, to commit murder, that he might be deprived of life by the hands of justice; and mingling a sentiment of benevolence with the cruelty of his intention, he reflected, that if he murdered a grown person, he might possibly send a soul to hell. To avoid this, he determined to murder a child, who could not have committed any sin which deserved damnation, but dying in innocence, would go immediately to Heaven. In consequence of these ideas, he actually murdered an infant of his master’s, for whom he had always shewn an uncommon degree of fondness. Such was the strange account which this infatuated creature gave on his trial;—and thus the random prophecy proved, as in many other cases, the cause of its own completion.