the king. The greater part of the army under his
command shared these feelings, and would gladly have followed him to Paris
to crush the revolutionary clubs, and to inflict condign punishment on the
authors and chief agents in the late insurrection. If he had but had the
skill to avail himself of this favorable state of feeling, there can be
little doubt that it was in his power at this moment to have established
the king in the full exercise of all the authority vested in him by the
Constitution, or even to have induced the Assembly to enlarge that
authority. He so mismanaged matters that he only increased the king's
danger, and brought general contempt and imminent danger on himself
likewise. His enemies had more than once accused him of wishing to copy
Cromwell. His friends had boasted that he would emulate Monk. But if he
was too scrupulous for the audacious wickedness of the one, he proved
himself equally devoid of the well-calculating shrewdness of the other.
If, subsequently, he had any reason to congratulate himself on the result
of his conduct, it was that, like the stork in the fable, after be had
thrust his head into the mouth of the wolf, he was allowed to draw it out
again in safety.

Louis's enemies had abundantly shown that they did not lack boldness. If
they were to be defeated, it could only be by action as bold as their own.
Unhappily, La Fayette's courage had usually found vent rather in
blustering words than in stout deeds; and those were the only weapons he
could bring himself to employ now. He resolved to remonstrate with the
Assembly; but instead of bringing up his army, or even a detachment, to
back his remonstrance, he came to Paris with a single aid-de-camp, and, on
the 28th of June, presented himself at the bar of the Assembly and
demanded an audience. A fortnight before he had written a letter to the
president, in which he had denounced alike the Jacobin leaders of the
clubs and the Girondin ministers, and had called on the Assembly to
suppress the clubs; a letter which had produced no effect except to unite
the two parties against whom it was aimed more closely together, and also
to give them a warning of his hostility to them, which, till he was in a
position to show it by deeds, it would have been wiser to have avoided.

He now repeated by word of mouth the statements and arguments which he had
previously advanced in writing, with the addition of a denunciation of the
recent insurrection