of the French.  If they possessed the power of proclaiming him king, they also possessed that of proclaiming him a simple citizen.  Forfeiture for the national utility, and that of the human race, was evidently one of its principles, and yet how did it act?  It leaves Louis XVI. king, or makes him king, not through respect for that institution, but out of respect for his person, and pity for so great a downfall.  Such was the truth; it feared sacrilege, and fell into anarchy.  It was clement, noble, and generous.  Louis XVI. had deserved well from his people; who well can dare to censure so magnanimous a condescension?  Before the king’s departure for Varennes, the absolute right of the nation was but an abstract fiction, the summum jus of the Assembly.  The royalty of Louis XVI. was respectable and respected, once again it was established.

XV.

But a moment arrived, and this moment was when the king fled his kingdom, protesting against the will of the nation, and sought the assistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the Assembly legitimately possessed the rigorous right of disposing of the power, thus abandoned or betrayed.  Three courses were open:  to declare the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaim a republican revolution; the temporary suspension of the royalty, and govern in its name during its moral eclipse; and, lastly, to restore the monarchy.

The Assembly chose the worst alternative of the three.  It feared to be harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people; it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his torture and his death.

Of the two other courses, the first was the most logical, to proclaim the downfall of the monarchy and the formation of a republic.

The republic, had it been properly established by the Assembly, would have been far different from the republic traitorously and atrociously extorted nine months after by the insurrection of the 10th of August.  It would have doubtless suffered the commotion, inseparable from the birth of a new order of things.  It would not have escaped the disorders of nature in a country where every thing was done by first impulse, and impassioned by the magnitude of its perils.  But it would have originated in law and not in sedition—­in right, and not in violence—­in deliberation, and not in insurrection.  This alone could have changed the sinister conditions of its birth and its future fate; it might become an agitating power, but it would remain pure and unsullied.

Only reflect for a moment how entirely its legal and premeditated proclamation would have altered the course of events.  The 10th of August would not have taken place—­the perfidy and tyranny of the commune of Paris—­the massacre of the guards—­the assault on the palace—­the flight of the king to the Assembly—­the outrages heaped on him there—­and his imprisonment in the temple—­would have never occurred.