In those same years he was flooded by surrounding society with every article of his political creed, and it was stamped upon him in that plastic period of life both by the overwhelming success of his own efforts in the service of that creed, and by that creed’s general success in its first undertakings. The Declaration of Independence he had helped to make triumph; once it had triumphed he had witnessed--from a distance it is true, and with some of the too hopeful illusions of distance--the prosperous career of its principles upon its native soil. Such pressure coming at such a moment in the development of a man, crystallizes him; and for fifty mortal years, from the achievement of American independence to his death in 1834, Lafayette remained Lafayette without growth or change. For pages so few as these a summary so short must suffice. The reader will expand for himself the consequences following upon this type of sincerity, conviction, and fixed, immutable in experience. In religion it was inevitable that such a mind should be dry. He professed, of course, the thin Deism which some may claim in old age to have turned to conceptions a trifle warmer and more full of stuff; but I confess these tinges of colour seem to me superadded from social fashions contemporary with his later years, when the Catholic Church, which in his youth nearly all the educated class in his country took to be a dying superstition, had reasserted its vitality. In politics such a man stood also, of course, for those plain and fundamental principles which all clear thought has discovered to be the basis of just government: that sovereignty must reside with the people; that the usurpation of that sovereignty, whether effected in the name of the people or in contempt of them, must be equally resisted; that laws once fixed, having in them necessarily an element of conflicting detail, necessarily lead to dissensions, but must be obeyed by all indifferently until they are changed by the popular voice; that violence is permissible only against aggression from without or illegal action from within--and so forth. On the other hand, through an illusion common enough in men of this type, he confounded certain modern adjuncts of these ancient truths with the truth themselves. Thus he thought there was something sacred in representation and could hardly distinguish between the nation and an electoral body proceeding from it. He believed in the equality of man without seizing the fact that this, so far from being self evident, is a tremendous and mystical dogma allied with a particular type of religion and rising or perishing with it. He took for granted the necessity in any free state of leaving the courts of justice untrammelled by the executive, but he neither devised nor thought there needed to be devised any scheme whereby the courts, thus untrammelled, should be kept pure.