Meanwhile, the moderate party rested all its hopes on Lafayette, who was friendly not only to liberty, but to order. He considered himself the founder of the new monarchy, of constitutional royalty; but, for that very reason, he felt that he had duties toward the King. Despising the reactionists, whose hopes were more or less enlisted on behalf of the foreign armies, he also detested the Jacobins who were dishonoring and compromising the new order of things. He expresses both sentiments in a letter addressed to the National Assembly, and written from the intrenched camp of Maubeuge, June 16, 1792, the Fourth Year of Liberty: "Can you conceal from yourselves," he says in it, "that a faction, and to use plain terms, the Jacobin faction, has caused all these disorders? I make the accusation boldly. Organized like a separate empire, with its capital and its affiliations blindly directed by certain ambitious chiefs, this sect forms a distinct body in the midst of the French people, whose powers it usurps by subjugating its representatives and agents. In its public meetings, attachment to the laws is named aristocracy, and disobedience to them patriotism; there the {179} assassins of Desilles are received in triumph, and Jourdan's insensate clamor finds panegyrists; there the story of the assassinations which defiled the city of Metz is still greeted with infernal applause." Lafayette puts himself courageously forward in his letter: "As to me, gentlemen, who espoused the American cause at the very time when the ambassadors assured me it was lost; who, from that period, devoted myself to a persistent defence of the liberty and sovereignty of peoples; who, on June 11, 1789, in presenting a declaration of rights to my country, dared to say, 'For a nation to be free, all that is necessary is that it shall will to be so,' I come to-day, full of confidence in the justice of our cause, of scorn for the cowards who desert it, and of indignation against the traitors who would sully it; I come to declare that the French nation, if it be not the vilest in the universe, can and ought to resist the conspiracy of kings which has been leagued against it." At the same time, the general enthusiastically praised his soldiers: "Doubtless it is not within the bosom of my brave army that sentiments of timidity are permissible. Patriotism, energy, discipline, patience, mutual confidence, all civic and military virtues, I find here. Here the principles of liberty and equality are cherished, the laws respected, and property held sacred; here, neither calumnies nor seditions are known."