In some respects Lafayette is a character to whom it is difficult to be just. His opportunities were so great. His limitations were so obvious. His failure was so complete. But it is possible that his failure inclines us to judge him too harshly. It is not fair to condemn a man because he could not understand a portent, to censure a politician who could not cope with the French Revolution. Had Lafayette been a worse man, he might have fared better than he did. Had he been a less conspicuous man, he would have borne a higher reputation to-day. He was certainly ambitious. He was certainly vain. He had little breadth of judgment or of vision. He was too much the slave of his own formulas. He was too ready to echo democratic phrases, without considering whether they applied or not. He was too ready to destroy the authority of the Crown, to reduce the ministers to puppets, to encourage the rash schemes of the Assembly. He was too ready to spend time and pains in winning popularity from the bourgeois of Paris. He was too ready to countenance dubious acts of policy and intrigue. He had not sufficient statesmanship to see the dangers of the time and the imperative necessity of combined and well-considered action. His stiff propriety would not permit him to associate with Mirabeau, even for public ends. But still, in a day when the character of many public men was low, Lafayette's motives were neither sordid nor corrupt, and all through his long career he displayed a staunch loyalty to his honest, if limited, ideals. Unwavering consistency, although the virtue of weak men, often lends dignity to conduct, and that dignity Lafayette possessed. The worst charge which can be brought against him in the early days of the Revolution is that his policy mingled too largely with ideas of personal aggrandisement. From the 5th and 6th October, when his doubtful behaviour secured him the first power in the State, Lafayette's chief object seems to have been so to organise the National Guard, as to maintain his own dictatorship, to assert the predominance of the middle classes, with whose views he cordially agreed, and to repress all attempts from the Court, from Mirabeau, from the multitude, or from any other quarter, to lead the political movement into courses which would take its direction out of his hands.