“I think as you do,” answered Louis Philippe. “It is impossible to have passed two years in America and not to be of that opinion. But do you believe that in the present situation of France and in accordance with general opinion that it would be proper to adopt it?” “No,” said Lafayette; “what the French people want to-day is a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions.” “Such is my belief,” Louis Philippe agreed. Charles X. had fled from his kingdom before Lafayette and the people even as his brother Louis XVIII. had once fled from it before Napoleon and the people. On August 9, 1830, the Duke of Orleans entered the Palais Bourbon, where the Chambers were assembled, as lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and left it as Louis Philippe, King of the French. The constitution which he had sworn to obey was not, like former charters, a favor granted by the throne, but was the organic law of the land, to the keeping of which the sovereign was as much bound as the humblest of his subjects. Lafayette and the people had at last won a great victory for independence after all the ups and downs of the Revolution and the days of Napoleon. As Lafayette marched his reorganized National Guard, thirty thousand strong, in review before the King, it was clear that the General was the most popular, as well as the most powerful, man in France. And at the public dinner that the city of Paris gave him on August fifteenth, when he congratulated his fellow-citizens on the success and valor with which they had defended their liberties and besought them to preserve the fruits of victory by union and order, he could justly feel that a life devoted to the cause of freedom had not been spent in vain. The coming years were to show that the people of France had much yet to learn about self-government, but when one contrasts the results of the revolution of 1830 with that of 1789 one sees how far they had progressed in knowledge. Lafayette’s presence was needed at Louis Philippe’s court to act as a buffer between the sovereign and the people, and again and again he saw revealed the truth of the old adage, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Presently a revolution in Belgium left the throne of that country vacant and it was offered to Lafayette. “What would I do with a crown!” he exclaimed. “Why, it would suit me about as much as a ring would become a cat!”