From the moment of the royal family’s flight and its enforced return to Paris, war with Europe was apparent, and the Revolution moved toward it as toward an approaching goal. The nearer that huge and novel thing approached, the more did Lafayette’s conception of a perfect state and Lafayette’s militia weapon for its achievement shrivel and lose staff. The populace demanded the disenthronement of a king who was certainly allied with the foreigner. This threat of popular violence was militarily suppressed by Lafayette and his middle-class militia on the seventeenth of July, 1791, and the few dead who had been shot by Lafayette’s guard became the symbols of an intense hatred between the old declining Constitutionalists and the new order that was to be established when once the cannons had begun. From that moment, despite all his ideals, he was merged with the privileged and the few in the eyes of his countrymen. A month later, at Pillnitz, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia met the French emigrants to issue their threat of a coalition against the new democracy and of armed intervention in the affairs of France; and when at last the accomplished Constitution of 1791, bourgeois, satisfactory, a strict deduction from principles which nothing so vital as the French blood has ever accepted, was compiled and sworn to, it seemed, in the presence of approaching exultation and war, like some merchant’s villa carefully put in order in the suburbs of our great industrial towns--a villa just settled by some careful housewife, bound to a narrow life--but about to receive a company of soldiers, of poets, of gods, and of demons, very ill-suited to such furniture! Even to the men of its own time this new Constitution, the supposed fruit of the Revolution, seemed oddly colourless as it stood contrasted against that great dark cloud of history which was rising upon the sky. But to Lafayette it was a perfected ideal. Upon the last day of September, 1791, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the National Assembly dissolved, and the speaker of it read out these words: “The National and Constituent Assembly declares that it has fulfilled its mission, and that its sessions are at an end.” A week later Lafayette resigned his command at the head of the National Guard. Shortly afterward the three armies upon the frontier were drawn up, and the real game, the struggle with armed and foreign conquerors, pledged to destroy the Revolution, had begun.