that progress must go slowly, and that in striving to arrive quickly, one runs the risk of losing one's way. You persuaded yourself that by destroying everything that already existed, good or bad, you would make a perfect work and that you would then re-establish what it was useful to preserve. Led away by this desire, you have attacked the very foundations of royalty, and covered with bitterness and insult the best of kings. All his efforts and sacrifices to bring you back to wiser ideas have been useless, and you have not ceased to calumniate his intentions and to humiliate him in the eyes of his people, in taking from royalty all the prerogatives which inspire love and respect. Torn from his palace and taken to Paris in the most disgraceful manner, his goodness never failed. He opened his arms to his misguided children, and tried to come to an understanding with them in order to cooperate with them for the welfare of France, which he cherished in spite of its errors. You have forced him to sign a Constitution not yet completed, although he represented to you that it would be better not to sanction an unfinished piece of work, and you have obliged him to present it in this form to the People before a Federation of which the object was to attach the Departments to you in isolating the King from the nation." "Ah, Madame, do not complain of the Federation. We should have been lost, had you known how to profit by it," replied Barnave. "The King, in spite of the fresh insults he has received since then, could not make up his mind to do what he has now done. But, attacked in his principles – in his family – in his person – profoundly afflicted by the crimes committed throughout France and seeing a general disorganization in all departments of Government, with the evils which result; determined to quit Paris in order to go to another town in the kingdom, where, free in his own actions, he could persuade t|he Assembly to revise its decrees and where he could in concert with it make a new Constitution, in which the different authorities could be classified and replaced in their proper place and could work for the happiness of France. I do not speak of our own sorrows. The King alone, who should make