defence of the men who slew Louis XVI. for crimes which others
committed.

[1] During the reign of terror Rochambeau was arrested at his estate
near Vendome, conducted to Paris, thrown into the Conciergerie and
condemned to death. When the car came to convey a number of victims
to the guillotine, he was about to mount it, but the official in
charge seeing it full thrust him back. "Stand back, old marshal,"
cried he, roughly, "your turn will come by and by." A sudden change
in political affairs saved his life, and enabled him to return to
his home near Vendome. Rochambeau survived the Revolution, and
received the grand cross of the Legion of Honor and a marshal's
pension from the great Napoleon.--_From Irving's Life of
Washington._

It is probable that none save Washington could have guided the nation
through the perilous excitement aroused by the efforts of the French
minister Genet to involve the United States in war with England and other
powers. For a time many cool-headed and able men were carried away by the
popular enthusiasm in favor of France, but Genet presumed too far, when
he deliberately insulted and defied that national authority which the
nation itself had created, and the American people rallied at length,
irrespective of party, to the support of the President. France for the
time, abandoned her menacing attitude, only to resume it a few years
later, with results disastrous to herself.

* * *

However American in feeling, it is impossible not to have some sympathy
with the Indians in their struggle to retain their hunting-grounds beyond
the Ohio. Savages as they were, natural right was on their side, and many
of the whites opposed to them were more savage and inhuman than the worst
of the redskinned barbarians. The massacre of the Christian Indians at
Gnadenhutten by a party of frontiersmen was a deed not surpassed in
atrocity in the annals of any country, and far surpassing in deliberate
cruelty anything charged against the Indian race. It was a pity that the
actual perpetrators of that dark crime did not fall into the hands of
warlike Indians, instead of the unfortunate William Crawford, the leader
of a subsequent expedition, whose awful death by fire was the Indian
penalty for the Moravian massacre. The masterly ability of Little Turtle
proved for years a barrier against pioneer progress, and