"Well then," returned La Fayette, "I take on myself all the responsibility of this arrest;" and he instantly wrote an order to all the national guards and citizens to arrest the king.

This was also a dictatorship, and the most personal of all dictatorships, that a single man, taking the place of the Assembly, and the whole nation, thus assumed.

He, on his private authority and the right of his civic foresight, struck at the liberty and perhaps the life of the lawful ruler of the nation.

This order led Louis XVI.

to the scaffold, for it restored to the people the victim who had escaped their clutches.