The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.
It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution.

Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man.

There had been a steady movement toward this event for a thousand years--in fact, ever since the dogma that _labor is degrading_ was placed at the foundation of the social structure of France.
The direct causes which were precipitating the crisis in the closing eighteenth century were financial and economic, while the contributing causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of Independence in America.

It is possible that a king with a heart and a brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event by awakening hope.

The Revolution was born of hopeless misery.