A new influence was showing itself. Danton and Robespierre were active. Clubs were organized, whose daily meetings lashed the people to lawless frenzy. Extreme counsels prevailed. Violence and outrage ensued. The Jacobins, whose very name has become a synonym for counsellors of sedition, were beginning to be dominant. The Revolution was losing its original character. The generous Lafayette, who had been its representative and its glory, in whom its true grandeur and humanity were all personified, revolted at its excesses. From camp he addressed the National Assembly, denouncing the Jacobins as substituting license for liberty,--and then, supporting his letter, gallantly appeared at the bar of the Assembly and repeated his denunciation. But the Reign of Terror was lowering, destined to fill France with darkness, and to send a shudder through the world. After bloody conflict at the gates of the palace, the King and his family were driven to seek protection in the bosom of the Assembly. The scaffold was not yet entirely ready. But the Constitution was overturned, and with it Lafayette. Doubly faithful, first to the oath he had taken, and then to his own supreme integrity, he denounced the audacious crime. He was then at the head of his army; but Jacobin hate had marked him as victim. Shrinking from the horrors of civil contest, where success is purchased only by the blood of fellow-citizens, he resolved--sad alternative!--to withdraw from his post, and, passing into neutral territory, seek the United States, there from a distance to watch the storm which was desolating his own unhappy country. As his eminence was without precedent, so also was his fall. Power, fortune, family, country, all were suddenly changed for a dungeon, where, amidst cruel privations, for more than five years, he wore away life. But not in vain; for who can listen to the story of his captivity without confessing new admiration for that sublime fidelity to principle which illumined his dungeon?