Lafayette came back to America long after, when time had added to this conception of him nothing that was not to his advantage. He was, in that second coming of his, surrounded by younger men, who felt for him all the reverence we humans feel for an older generation of heroes (he was nearer seventy than sixty years of age). He was known to have kept himself pure from the excesses of the French Revolution--excesses which were nowhere more detested than in America, and which had not yet been made explicable by the judgment of history. He came back to them, preserving the same ideal of liberty that he had discovered among them nearly fifty years before. It is no wonder that the view held of him in the foreign country he had served under arms should be what we know it to be. Nevertheless, if his career be considered as a whole, his interior temperament and character, as well as the external effect of these upon his contemporaries, are best judged not by his appearance in American history, as a boy in the War of Independence, as an old man on his return, but by that conspicuous ordeal through which he passed in the vigour of his manhood, when he decided neither to defend nor to coerce the French people, but to be rid of his native soil and the obligations of his birth. This ordeal showed Lafayette under the strongest light and in his fullest development. Whether he was wrong or right _then_, if wrong or right, _why_, are final answers to the problem of his place in history. At the moment when he deliberately abandoned the French army for exile he was within a few weeks of his thirty-fifth birthday, and the events which had led up to that final catastrophe had concerned the fullest and most active years of his career. We know him most largely and we can judge him most justly if we consider his work between the April when war first put its novel and moulding pressure upon the French Revolution and the August day in which he saw fit to surrender his command. That last crisis belongs to August, 1792. Let us turn to the origin of his political position in 1787. Lafayette was then a man just thirty years of age, in the enjoyment of a fame which, both in character and in extent, was unexampled, when economic necessity, which is to great political changes what the trigger is to the firing of a rifle, compelled the French crown to play the experiment of summoning the Assembly of Notables.