“His life was beset with inconceivable responsibility and perils, for he was ever the minister of humanity and order among a frenzied people who had come to regard order and humanity as phases of treason. He rescued the queen from the murderous hands of the populace, not to speak of multitudes of humbler victims who had been devoted to death. He risked his life in many unsuccessful attempts to rescue others. He was obliged to witness the butchery of Foulon, and the reeking heart of Berthier torn from his lifeless body and held up in triumph before him. Disgusted with enormities which he was powerless to prevent and could not countenance, he resigned his commission; but so impossible was it to replace him that he was induced to resume it. “In the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, his influence was always felt in favor of republican principles, for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for religious tolerance, for popular representation, for the establishment of trial by jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abolition of titles of nobility, and the suppression of privileged orders. “Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness in the world to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the marvellous vicissitudes of his singularly eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect. “No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years so large a measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a ‘canine appetite’ for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave even to rashness; his life was one of constant personal peril, and yet he never shrank from any danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the defenceless, to sustain the law and preserve order.” Hon. Chauncey Depew thus concisely comments upon La Fayette’s influence in France:—