t their rights against the intolerable arrogance of the French
court. Leopold now gathered his armies to trample those people down, and
to replace the scepter of unlimited despotism in the hands of the
Bourbons. With sleepless zeal Leopold cooeperated with nearly all the
monarchs in Europe, in combining a resistless force to crush out from
the continent of Europe the spirit of popular liberty. An army of ninety
thousand men was raised to cooeperate with the French emigrants and all
the royalists in France. The king was to escape from Paris, place
himself at the head of the emigrants, amounting to more than twenty
thousand, rally around his banners all the advocates of the old regime,
and then, supported by all the powers of combined Europe, was to march
upon Paris, and take a bloody vengeance upon a people who dared to wish
to be free. The arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes deranged this plan.
Leopold, alarmed not only by the impending fate of his sister, but lest
the principles of popular liberty, extending from France, should
undermine his own throne, wrote as follows to the King of England:

"I am persuaded that your majesty is not unacquainted with the unheard
of outrage committed by the arrest of the King of France, the queen my
sister and the royal family, and that your sentiments accord with mine
on an event which, threatening more atrocious consequences, and fixing
the seal of illegality on the preceding excesses, concerns the honor and
safety of all governments. Resolved to fulfill what I owe to these
considerations, and to my duty as chief of the German empire, and
sovereign of the Austrian dominions, I propose to your majesty, in the
same manner as I have proposed to the Kings of Spain, Prussia and
Naples, as well as to the Empress of Russia, to unite with them, in a
concert of measures for obtaining the liberty of the king and his
family, and setting bounds to the dangerous excesses of the French
Revolution."

The British _people_ nobly sympathized with the French in their efforts
at emancipation, and the British government dared not _then_ shock the
public conscience by assailing the patriots in France. Leopold
consequently turned to Frederic William of Prussia, and held a private
conference with him at Pilnitz, near Dresden, in Saxony, on the 27th of
August, 1791. The Count d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI., and who
subsequently ascended the French throne as Charles X., joined them in
this conference. In the