sudden and no-longer-to-be repressed flame.
Among the first to declare themselves admirers and advocates of a new and republican form of government, as a panacea for the national distress, were M. and Madame Roland. In the prospective downfall of Royalty in France they beheld glorious visions of another France, a new American Republic, a republic void of aristocratical distinctions, where merit and not rank should demand and receive homage.
Madame Roland, filled with enthusiastic energy, wrote from Lyons to the Paris journals political letters of the most radical stamp, thus unwittingly helping to kindle the blaze which lit her own funeral pyre. But in joining the Revolutionists she had declared, "We must be ready for everything, even to die without regret!" Whatever may have been the mistakes which made the French Revolution so terrible a failure, it is certain that most of its original leaders were at first animated by only the purest
