“But French democracy had not been trained and educated in the schools of the Puritan or the colonist. Ages of tyranny, of suppression, repression, and torture had developed the tiger and dwarfed the man. Democracy had not learned the first rudiments of liberty,—self-restraint and self-government. It beheaded king and queen; it drenched the land with the blood of the noblest and best; in its indiscriminate frenzy and madness it spared neither age nor sex, virtue nor merit, and drove its benefactor, because he denounced its excesses and tried to stem them, into exile and the dungeon of Olmütz. Thus ended in the horrors of the French Revolution La Fayette’s first fight for liberty at home. After five years of untold sufferings, spurning release at the price of his allegiance to monarchy, holding with sublime faith, amidst the most disheartening and discouraging surroundings, to the principles of freedom for all, he was released by the sword of Napoleon Bonaparte, to find that the untamed ferocity of the Revolution had been trained to the service of the most brilliant, captivating, and resistless of military despotisms by the mighty genius of the great Dictator. He only was neither dazzled nor dismayed, and when he had rejected every offer of recognition and honor, Napoleon said: ‘La Fayette alone in France holds fast to his original ideas of liberty. Though tranquil now, he will reappear if occasion offers.’ Against the first consulate of Bonaparte he voted, ‘No, unless with guaranties of freedom.’ When Europe lay helpless at the feet of the conqueror, and, in the frenzy of military glory, France neither saw nor felt the chains he was forging upon her, La Fayette, from his retirement of La Grange, plead with the Emperor for republican principles, holding up to him the retributions always meted out to tyrants, and the pure, undying fame of the immortal few who patriotically decide, when upon them alone rests the awful verdict, whether they shall be the enslavers or the saviors of their country.