“Your Majesty enjoyed great privileges which you believed belonged to royalty. Brought up in the idea of preserving them, you could not see them taken from you with pleasure; your desire to recover them was as natural as your regret at seeing them destroyed. These sentiments, natural to the human heart, must have entered into the calculation of the enemies of the Revolution. They counted then on secret favor, until such times as circumstances permitted open protection. This disposition could not escape the nation itself, and it has been driven to defiance. Your Majesty has been constantly between two alternatives: yielding to your prejudices, to your private preferences, or making sacrifices dictated by philosophy and demanded by necessity; that is, either emboldening the rebels by disturbing the nation; or quieting the nation by uniting with her. Everything has its course, and this uncertainty must end soon. “Does Your Majesty ally yourself openly to-day with those who are pretending to reform the constitution? Are you going generously to devote yourself without reserve to its triumph? Such is the true question, and the present state of things makes a solution necessary. “As for the very metaphysical question, are the French ripe for liberty, the discussion is of no importance here; it is not a question of judging what we shall be in a century, but of seeing of what the present generation is capable. “The Declaration of Rights has become a political gospel, and the French Constitution, a religion for which the people are ready to die. Already violence has sometimes supplanted the law. When the law has not been sufficiently vigorous to meet the situation, the citizens have taken things in their own hands. This is why the property of the _émigrés_, or persons of their party, has been exposed to pillage. This is why so many departments have been forced to punish severely the priests whom public opinion had proscribed, and who otherwise would have become its victims. “In the shock of interests, passion has controlled. The country is not a word that the imagination amuses itself in embellishing; it is a being for whom one makes sacrifices, to whom one becomes attached according to the suffering that it causes, who has been created by great effort, and raised up in the midst of disturbances, and who is loved for what it has cost as well as for what it promises. Every attack made upon it inflames enthusiasm for it. “To what point is this enthusiasm going to rise when the enemy’s forces, united without, intrigue with those within to deal it the most fatal blows? [Illustration: MADAME ROLAND. From a painting by an unknown artist in the Musée Carnavalet. ]