In that futile (and necessarily barren) council he sat of right, and he found there the atmosphere which was fated to embarrass his whole effort among the French, his people, when once they were aroused. He found in that assembly the enmity of many of his equals among the very small clique of wealthy nobles of which he was a natural part, the friendship of a few, the enthusiasm of none; he found himself possessed of a greatly exaggerated popularity with the plebeian public outside, which was attached to his name and his story, and knew nothing of his character; and while he desired to erect a new state, he figured only as one of those who in that assembly proposed financial reforms irritating to the court and, to the appetite of the French for an ideal society, so much chaff. It would be a grave error in judgment to conceive of Lafayette then, or at any subsequent period of his life, even to his extreme old age, as a man lacking in that peculiar devotion to a political theory which distinguishes the masters of national fate from the statesman or the mere politician. He _did_ enjoy, and throughout his life he displayed, a firm faith in a certain and definite political ideal. It was a faith so clear that it was capable of expression in a creed, and so secure that he held it without a modification from his earliest youth to his very death; and that through changes of fortune, and under the strain of a varying environment more violent than any that oppressed his contemporaries. Unfortunately for him, his creed was a creed peculiarly unacceptable to the French people. It consisted largely of negative articles. It proposed the exact toleration of all religion that did not offend the current morality of his time (an attitude which he and many others mistook for a complete scheme of toleration). It proposed an acceptation of popular sovereignty but a popular sovereignty with Lafayette, quite unlike the mass of Frenchmen, believed could be accurately expressed by a representative system. This creed acquiesced in the political privileges of wealth. It would confine civic activity and responsibility to those citizens who happened to be possessed of certain property: no doctrine is more odious to Catholic Europe. Finally Lafayette’s creed was summed up in a curiously passionate attachment to the letter of organic laws or, as men put that foible in English, “a respect for the Constitution.”