When the Revolution of 1789 came to France there were many people, of all parties and conditions, who believed that the country had its Washington. He was to be found, they thought, in the person of the Marquis de La Fayette. This man was Washington's friend. He had successfully copied many of his virtues. He was unselfishly patriotic. He believed in the liberty of the people, and wished to see them govern themselves. Though himself a nobleman, he believed in the abolition of titles of nobility. In his room, and afterward in his office as a public servant, he kept two frames hanging on the wall. In one frame was a copy of the American Declaration of Independence. The other frame was empty, but it bore the legend, "This space awaits the French Declaration of Independence." When the Revolution broke out, La Fayette was called by the people to the center of real power--the command of the troops in Paris. Both king and people trusted him. His power for good was almost absolute. He prevented anarchy and restored order in Paris after the overthrow of the Bastile. He gave the country a Bill of Rights and a Constitution founded on the American models. The quarrels of the warring factions were stayed by his hand. The mob dared not turn the king out. La Fayette's moderating influence was the ballast that kept the French nation, in spite of certain excesses, on a steady keel. Even when the Girondists and Jacobins rose and were ready to fly at one another's throats, the fear of La Fayette kept these factions from violence. If he had maintained this influence--if he had preserved the sagacity and boldness to side with the people and lead them--the French nation might have been saved from anarchy, reaction, the tyrannies of emperors and of mobs, and the slow degeneration that has followed its long diet of gunpowder. But in the test La Fayette did not exhibit this power. In 1792 he was in the field, in command of an army, resisting the Prussian invasion. The nation, aroused, was equal to the task of repelling foreign attack. But in Paris events were marching. The people rose and overthrew the throne and the royalist Constitution which La Fayette had made. But they turned still to La Fayette. They offered him the chief executive power in the new government. This was his opportunity to save France. He was not equal to it. He did not rise to the emergency. He not only refused the offer of power, but made his troops renew their oaths of fidelity to the king. Then the Assembly declared him a traitor; and La Fayette, taking with him a few followers, deserted his command, made his way to Bouillon, on the frontier, and rode out of France into a foreign land!