He wrote to his friend Lafayette: “Harmony, honesty, industry, and temperance are the qualities to make us a great and happy people. This path to the attainment of the people’s happiness is as plain and straight as a ray of light.” He would not accept a salary even as President. He considered it a great boon to be in a position to render services to the State without remuneration. With grave earnestness he took up the labors of his position, in order to master the difficulties that awaited him on all sides. A heavy load of debt was hanging over the country, commerce and trade needed encouragement, and the frontiers suffered much from the depredations of Indian tribes. With the outbreak of the French revolution new difficulties arose. Washington considered the events in Paris a natural consequence of previous misgovernment, but in spite of his esteem for certain Frenchmen, he soon felt that the moral earnestness essential for the attainment of true liberty was lacking among the masses of the French people. His prophetic soul already foresaw what the end of the movement would be. He pointed out the erratic qualities of the French people and the bloody acts of revenge of which they were guilty and continued: “There certainly are reefs and sand-bars enough on which the Ship of State may be wrecked, and in this case a much more disastrous despotism will result from the movement than that from which the people have suffered before.” Whatever was sound in the French revolution was brought back by the French who had fought in America. Unfortunately the sound ideas, as we know, did not long prevail, and with the reaction came corresponding bestial degeneration. The fate which overtook King Louis the Sixteenth moved Washington profoundly; never in his life, those close to him have told us, had he been so crushed and bowed down as when the news of Louis’ execution was received. The horrors in France had their echoes in America; clubs were formed which presented the claims of the French Jacobins. A picture was published by them with the inscription, “Washington’s Funeral,” in which he was represented standing under the guillotine; they did not conceal their intention of ignoring the President and the Constitution. Washington stood firm amidst party storms, as he had once stood on the Delaware when storm and ice threatened to destroy his bark. This firmness and the further development of the bloody drama in France caused the extreme party in America gradually to lose its influence with the people and finally to disappear.