This last article in the political faith of Lafayette was certainly that which most strongly possessed him, and that which he most tenaciously defended to the end. He had in his feeling for it something of religion. Indeed, it was in part the absence of other religion from his character which must account for so singular and so unnational an intellectual weakness. His passion for a constitution was as little based on reason, as unanswerable and as strong, as is the passion of any worshipper for the object of his worship. He did not postulate a constitution as something necessary to any state,--which it is,--nor did he accept it as one accepts any other inevitable mechanical condition of national life: he adored it. And he gave to his idol, as men always must to any idol, concrete form. He was enthusiastic for a particular and visible scheme which he associated with the ideal of liberty: a representative assembly of politicians, an executive cabinet nominally responsible to that assembly, a judicature nominally independent of either: in a word he blindly worshipped what (to speak disrespectfully) we may call to-day the whole discredited business of parliamentarians. If the love of country interfered with such a scheme, or a burning zeal for equality, or deep personal love for a military leader; if an almost physical appetite for the ancient customs of the state rooted in the very heart of men interfered with it, if any of these human accidents were at issue with his idol, why, then, according to him, they must be broken at the idol’s feet. It is this strange, and, to French eyes, grossly insufficient ideal of a “constitution,” which explains all that was to follow. When the National Assembly met in May, 1789, Lafayette sat in that one of the three separate houses which represented the nobility. The mere presence of a parliament or congress, with a crown in its neighbourhood, was a beginning for his dream. To the rising flood of egalitarian feeling he gave no aid. He was not a prime mover in that prime current of the early Revolution which drew many members of the privileged orders--the nobles and the clergy--to sit frankly with the Commons. But when that current was in full flood he did not resist it; when it had conquered, and when the privileged were merged in the general flood, he found himself a vice-president of the united assembly just before the fall of the Bastille. Of course he drew up a Declaration of Rights, which, equally of course, concerned taxation as the chief concern of a Statesman, took seriously “redress before supply,” and all the rest of the parliamentary sawdust. It was removed a thousand miles from the temper of that Gaul which had been at hard war for two thousand years, which had made the orthodox religion of the West, the Crusades, the Gothic, and was now about to make the epic of Napoleon.