There were now three prominent parties in France. First, the Royalists, with the queen and the court, controlling the ever-vacillating king, at their head. They were plotting, through foreign armies and civil war, to restore the political and ecclesiastical despotism of the Old Régime. This party would have been utterly powerless but for the aid of foreign despots. Second came the Constitutional party, with La Fayette at its head. The king _professed_ to belong to this party, and at times, perhaps, with sincerity, but, overruled by others, he conducted with a degree of feebleness and fickleness which amounted to treachery. This party had originally embraced nearly the whole nation. Never did a nobler set of men undertake national reform than were the leaders of the French Revolution. They sought only the happiness of France, were anxious for peace with all nations, were decidedly conservative in their views. They had no desire to overthrow the French monarchy, but wished only to limit that monarchy by a Constitution which should secure to the nation civil and religious liberty. But the Constitutional party was now daily growing weaker, simply because its best friends saw that it was impossible to maintain the Constitution while the king himself was co-operating with foreign armies for its overthrow. Why should the people sustain a king, and furnish him with a salary of five millions of dollars a year, only to enable him to overthrow the Constitution and reinstate the rejected despotism? Thus were thousands of the purest men in France driven with great reluctance to the conviction that constitutional liberty could only be preserved by dethroning the king and establishing a republic. They were originally decidedly in favor of a constitutional monarchy. They felt that the transition was altogether too great and too sudden from utter despotism to republican freedom. The vast mass of the peasant population in France could neither read nor write. They were totally unacquainted with the forms of popular government. They were as ignorant as children, and almost entirely under the tutelage of the priests, to whom they believed that the keys of heaven and of hell had been intrusted. The establishment of republican forms would render France still more obnoxious to surrounding monarchies, and therefore they had wished to maintain the monarchy, and they took the British Constitution and not the American republic as their model, wishing, however, to infuse more of the popular element into their Constitution than has been admitted into the aristocratic institutions of England.