the
Jacobin Club the most violent propositions were mooted. Some wanted to
establish a minority, on the ground of the King's mental alienation;
some, to send the Queen back to Austria; the more moderate talked of
suppressing the army, {178} dismissing the staff-officers of the
National Guard, depriving the King of the right of veto, and electing a
Constituent Assembly. Revolutionary conventicles multiplied beyond all
measure. The division of Paris into forty-eight sections became an
exhaustless source of confusion. The assembly of each section
transformed itself into a club.

Meanwhile, the moderate party rested all its hopes on Lafayette, who
was friendly not only to liberty, but to order. He considered himself
the founder of the new monarchy, of constitutional royalty; but, for
that very reason, he felt that he had duties toward the King.
Despising the reactionists, whose hopes were more or less enlisted on
behalf of the foreign armies, he also detested the Jacobins who were
dishonoring and compromising the new order of things. He expresses
both sentiments in a letter addressed to the National Assembly, and
written from the intrenched camp of Maubeuge, June 16, 1792, the Fourth
Year of Liberty: "Can you conceal from yourselves," he says in it,
"that a faction, and to use plain terms, the Jacobin faction, has
caused all these disorders? I make the accusation boldly. Organized
like a separate empire, with its capital and its affiliations blindly
directed by certain ambitious chiefs, this sect forms a distinct body
in the midst of the French people, whose powers it usurps by
subjugating its representatives and agents. In its public meetings,
attachment to the laws is named aristocracy, and disobedience to them
patriotism; there the {179} assassins of Desilles are received in
triumph, and Jourdan's insensate clamor finds panegyrists; there the
story of the assassinations which defiled the city of Metz is still
greeted with infernal applause."

Lafayette puts himself courageously forward in his letter: "As to me,
gentlemen, who espoused the American cause at the very time when the
ambassadors assured me it was lost; who, from that period, devoted
myself to a persistent defence of the liberty and sovereignty of
peoples; who, on June 11, 1789, in presenting a declaration of rights
to my country, dared to say, 'For a nation to be free, all that is
necessary is that it shall will to be so,' I come to-day, full of
c