enemies, and that close alliance with her was the sure and the only sure way to coerce either Great Britain to justice or Spain to a reasonable attitude touching the navigation of the Mississippi; while by offending France, they argued, we should be forced to wrestle single-handed with England first, then with victorious France, meantime securing no concession whatever from Spain.

This was a shrewd forecast of the actual event. The Federalists, destitute of idealism, proved to have been overawed by the prestige of England and to have under-estimated the might which freedom would impart to the French people. After Napoleon's great campaign of 1796-97, Pitt seeks peace, which the French Directory feels able to decline. In 1802 the Peace of Amiens is actually concluded, upon terms dictated by France. Had we been still in France's friendship, the two republics might have compelled England's abandonment of that course which evoked the war of 1812. As it was, ignored by England, to whom, as detailed below, we cringed in consenting to Jay's treaty, we were left to encounter the French navy alone, escaping open and serious war with France only by a readiness to negotiate which all but compromised our dignity. The Mississippi we had at last to open with money.

The federalist leaning toward Great Britain probably did not to so great an extent as was then alleged and widely believed, spring from monarchical feeling. It was due rather to old memories, as pleasant as they were tenacious, that would not be dissociated from England; to the individual

istic tendencies of republicanism, alarming to many; and to conservative habits of political thinking, the dread of innovation and of theory. The returned Tories had indeed all become Federalists, which fact, with many others, lent to this attitude the appearance of deficient patriotism, of sycophancy toward our old foe and persecutor.

Great Britain had refused to surrender the western posts according to the peace treaty of 1783, unjustly pleading in excuse the treatment of loyalists by our States. Not only the presence but the active influence of the garrisons at these posts encouraged Indian hostilities. England had also seized French goods in American (neutral) vessels, though in passage to the United States, and treated as belligerent all American ships plying between France and her West Indian colonies, on the ground that this commerce had been opened to them only by the pressure of war. The English naval officers were instructed to regard bread-stuffs as contraband if bound for France, even though owned by neutrals and in neutral ships; such cargoes, however, to be paid for by England, or released on bonds being given to land them elsewhere than in France. In this practice England followed France's example, except that she actually paid for the cargoes, while France only promised.

Worst of all, Britain claimed and acted upon the right to press into her naval service British-born seamen found anywhere outside the territory of a foreign State, halting our ships on the high seas for this purpose, often leaving them half-manned, and sometimes recklessly and cruelly impressing

native-born Americans an outrageous policy which ended in the war of 1812. The ignorance and injustice of the English admiralty courts aggravated most of these abuses.

Genet's proceedings, spoken of in the next chapter, which partly public sentiment, partly lack of army and navy made it impossible for our Government to prevent, enraged Great Britain to the verge of war. After the British orders in council of November 6, 1793, intended to destroy all neutral commerce with the French colonies, and Congress's counter-stroke of an embargo the following March, war was positively imminent. The President resolved to send Jay to England as envoy extraordinary, to make one more effort for an understanding.

The treaty negotiated by this gentleman, and ratified June 24, 1795 (excepting Article XII., on the French West India trade), was doubtless the most favorable that could have been secured under the circumstances; yet it satisfied no one and was humiliating in the extreme. The western posts were indeed to be vacated by June 1, 1796, though without indemnity for the past, but a British right of search and impressment was implicitly recognized, the French West Indian trade not rendered secure, and arbitrary liberty accorded to Great Britain in defining contraband. Opposition to ratification was bitter and nearly universal. The friends of France were jubilant. Jay was burned in effigy, Washington himself attacked. The utmost that Hamilton in his powerful "Letters of Camillus" could show was that the treaty seemed

preferable to war. Plainly we had then little to hope and much to fear from war with Great Britain, yet even vast numbers of Federalists denounced the pact as a base surrender to the nation's ancient tyrant, and wished an appeal to

arms.

Fisher Ames's eloquence decided the House for the treaty. An invalid, with but a span of life before him, he spoke as from the tomb. "There is, I believe," so ran his peroration, "no member who will not think his chance to be a witness of the consequences (should the treaty fail of ratification) greater than mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject, and a spirit should rise, as it will, with the public disorders, to make confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as my hold on life is, may outlive the Government and Constitution of my country!"

It was the most delicate crisis of Washington's presidency, and no other American then alive, being in his place, could have passed through it successfully. After the fury gradually subsided, men for a long time acquiesced rather than believed in the step which had been taken. In the end the treaty proved solidly advantageous, rather through circumstances, however, than by its intrinsic excellence.

CHAPTER V.

RELATIONS WITH THE FRENCH REPUBLIC

AT its beginning all Americans hailed the Revolution in France with joy, but its terrible excesses, when they appeared, produced here the same effect as in England, of alienating every one conservatively inclined. This included the mass of the federalist party. On the contrary, most of the Republicans, now more numerous, now less, actuated partly by true insight into the struggle, and partly by the magic of the words "revolution" and "republic," favored the revolutionists with a devotion which even the Reign of Terror in France scarcely shook. It was in consequence of this attitude on its part that the party came to be dubbed "democratic-republican" instead of "republican," the compound title itself giving way after about 1810 to simple "democratic."

Hostility to England, the memory of France's aid to us in our hour of need, the doctrine of "the rights of man," then so much in vogue, the known sympathies of Jefferson and Madison, who were already popular, and, alas, a mean wish to hamper the administration, all helped to swell the ranks of those who swung their hats for France. A far deeper motive with the more thoughtful was the