As soon as he was appointed he went to see the French minister of foreign affairs; and in answer to an observation of the latter stated with his customary straightforwardness that it was true that, while a mere private individual, sincerely friendly to France, and desirous of helping her, and whose own nation could not be compromised by his acts, he had freely taken part in passing events, had criticised the constitution, and advised the king and his ministers; but he added that, now that he was a public man, he would no longer meddle with their affairs. To this resolution he kept, save that, as already described, sheer humanity induced him to make an effort to save the king's life. He had predicted what would ensue as the result of the exaggerated decentralization into which the opponents of absolutism had rushed; when they had split the state up into more than forty thousand sovereignties, each district the sole executor of the law, and the only judge of its propriety, and therefore obedient to it only so long as it listed, and until rendered hostile by the ignorant whim or ferocious impulse of the moment; and now he was to see his predictions come true. In that brilliant and able state paper, the address he had drawn up for Louis to deliver when, in 1791, the latter accepted the constitution, the key-note of the situation was struck in the opening words: "It is no longer a king who addresses you, Louis XVI. is a private individual"; and he had then scored off, point by point, the faults in a document that created an unwieldy assembly of men unaccustomed to govern, that destroyed the principle of authority, though no other could appeal to a people helpless in their new-born liberty, and that created out of one whole a jarring multitude of fractional sovereignties. Now he was to see one of these same sovereignties rise up in successful rebellion against the government that represented the whole, destroy it and usurp its power, and establish over all France the rule of an anarchic despotism which, by what seems to a free American a gross misnomer, they called a democracy.
All through June, at the beginning of which month Morris had been formally presented at court, the excitement and tumult kept increasing. When, on the 20th, the mob forced the gates of the chateau, and made the king put on the red cap, Morris wrote in his Diary that the constitution had given its last groan. A few days afterwards he told Lafayette that in six weeks everything would be over, and tried to persuade him that his only chance was to make up his mind instantly to fight either for a good constitution or for the wretched piece of paper which bore the name. Just six weeks to a day from the date of this prediction came the 10th of August to verify it.