The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one of the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. The people, with unerring instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces they were playing with--the resolute and invincible determination of a people of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the accumulated and intolerable wrongs of centuries. The despatches and opinions of American ambassadors during this period are of inestimable value. The democratic Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events, declared that had there been no queen there would have been no revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes to Washington on January 1790: "If only the reigning prince were not the small beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of events, he would regain his authority," but "what would you have," he continues scornfully, "from a creature who, in his situation, eats, drinks and sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives. He must float along on the current of events and is absolutely a cypher." But the court would not forego its crooked ways. "The queen is even more imprudent," Morris writes in 1791, "and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids." Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury of 1,200,000,000 livres.