and personal motives induced to work upon his vanity or his resentment. He had, during the autumn, sought in Gerry and others of like views, the counsel which he did not ask of his legitimate advisers.

And how stood the cabinet? Isolated from the Executive; deprived of their just and proper influence upon his decisions; responsible to public opinion for acts over which they possessed no control; left to conduct the business of the nation without his assistance, and yet liable to his reversal; with no opportunity of enforcing their views by argument or evidence; their situation was at once irksome and oppressive. To Mr. Adams personally they owed nothing; appointed, with one exception, by his predecessor, he found them representatives of that predecessor's opinions, and of those of his party. Wolcott at least-it is believed all-had signified their readiness to yield their offices to his disposal. He had declined that offer. He therefore retained them, such as they were, and knowing what they were. No further the agents of his will than that he could direct their administrative acts, they owed no fidelity but to duty, no allegiance but to their country. In advising with those who politically agreed with them, they exercised a right of which he could not deprive them, and one of which he, it seems, made no scruple of exercising with their enemies. Mr. Adams might dismiss his ministers; he could not regulate their faith. But Mr. Adams chose to depart from the policy of the federalists, and his cabinet adhered to it. They might have resigned-the interests of their party and the wishes of their friends prevented them. They retained their posts that they might prevent him from doing mischief. A fatal necessity had thrust such a chief

a Mr. Jefferson, in speaking of his own intended relations with his cabinet, when he had come into office, says:

66

During Mr. Adams' administration, his long and habitual absences from the seat of government rendered this kind of

communication impracticable-removed him from any share in the transaction of affairs, and parcelled out the government in fact among four independent heads, drawing sometimes in opposite directions."-Jefferson's Writings, III., p. 487.

magistrate upon the country; they were right in controlling his actions.

Mr. Adams, in the above extract, as he has done on all occasions, has shown that he supposed himself to be not merely an Executive, but the Ruler of the country—that he considered a species of allegiance as due to him, whatever course he chose to follow, and that difference from, or opposition to his will was in itself political treason. will not be necessary to combat the idea. In theory, at least, with us, "le roi regne mais ne gouverne pas."

But there was "a spy in the cabinet." If by this Mr. Adams meant that any member of the cabinet, on any occasion, ever revealed a measure which honor, propriety, or the welfare of the country required should be kept private, the assertion is unqualifiedly false. With regard to this particular piece of information, by whomsoever it was made known, it was communicated for the justification of the officers, it was published for the purpose of their vindication, and that only where the calumnics of the Presi dent had rendered necessary the knowledge of the truth, and when the interests of the party demanded that his inconsistencies should be exposed in order to counteract their consequences. Mr. Adams, indeed, was the last one who should have complained of a betrayal of secrets. The veil of the cabinet chamber was lifted by no one so freely as by himself. His sayings and doings were published, not only to his wife and friends, but in every tavern at which he stopped on his way to and from Philadelphia, and to every visitor at Braintree or the Executive mansion. Charges of the most grave and serious character were thrown out or insinuated by him against his secretaries, and yet they were bound not to furnish the means of disproving them.

The truth of Mr. Hamilton's account is, however, denied, and Mr. Adams has given his own, and a different, history of the interview; traversing the statement that he

changed his mind after conversing with his ministers. That he did once entertain the idea of sending back a French envoy, should one be sent, he admits, and that he altered that intention.

An assertion of that kind would neither have been made by Mr. Hamilton, nor endorsed by Wolcott, without consideration. The fact was meant to be deliberately stated, and upon their responsibility. It is then a direct question of veracity. Now Mr. Hamilton's pamphlet appeared in the summer of 1800; Mr. Adams' letters in the year 1809. The probability of correct recollection, at least, is in favour of the former; and as the facts were within the knowledge of five persons besides the President, and two of those persons had at the time sided with him in his views of policy, it is unlikely that a statement would have been hazarded which would have been known to them to be false. Mr. Adams' occasional violence of temper has been already shown. The very explanation he has given is one instance of it, as no man of sane mind would have for a moment admitted such a thought; another is to be found in his remark to Mr. Jefferson in the preceding summer, "that he would not unbrace a single nerve for any treaty France could offer, such was their entire want of faith and morality," an observation of singular imprudence and impropriety. Mr. Adams, then, was at least capable of what has been attributed to him. But, beside the direct testimony of Hamilton and Wolcott, there is also that which is derived from the impeachment of Mr. Adams' own evidence. So many after-thoughts have been exposed in other parts of his narrative, that it is but fair to believe that prejudice and passion had discolored and distorted, in his own mind, every fact which affected those against whom they were directed.

• Jefferson's Writings, III., 391.

There are other observations which may be made in proof of this view.

Mr. Adams says that in sending for the heads of departments, after his arrival, his intention was merely to break the questions, not to ask their opinion or to give his own. Now he had previously asked Wolcott's opinion in writing, and that opinion had been prepared in consequence. He states, too, that the conduct of the gentlemen on the question of war was such as he wished it to be upon all others-they gave no opinion either for or against it. The wish shows a curious condition of mind, the assertion a remarkable obliviousness of fact. Of what

use were his counsellors if they were not to give their opinions? Were they merely to enrol his decrees? But an opinion was given, and in writing, by one, that a declaration of war was inexpedient, as inconsistent with the public sentiment. Again he says, that the suggestion

which was made that it should be left with France to make the first overture, he rejected as intended to produce war, although that suggestion was recommended and urged by the Secretary who had expressed his opinion against the war, and whose draught he in other respects adopted, it is to be supposed, as not incompatible with peace.

Such are some of the errors into which Mr. Adams has fallen in his endeavors to vindicate himself at the expense of others.

That there was a party who expected an unqualified declaration of war against France is unquestionable; more than this, there were those who considered that the honor and safety of the country demanded it. If ever, it is believed, there existed a righteous and good ground for war since the institution of nations, it existed in the year 1798, for a war by the United States against France. The heaped up outrages of years of piracy, of aggression and insult had formed a catalogue of wrongs which would have justified a war of extermination. Mr. Adams says

that he himself had, in the preceding summer, "animated the nation to war." It was not surprising, therefore, that this spirit should have prevailed. It was then a question of policy. And what did policy dictate? A war with France would have swept the ocean of her corsairs. It would have severed the connection between her and her West India possessions. It would have led to the seizure of Louisiana, which, nominally held by Spain, was in fact held in trust for her neighbor. It would have secured that bone of contention, the navigation of the Mississippi. It would have prevented that contingency which even Mr. Jefferson declared must be the signal of confining the French to high water mark, the occupation of New Orleans. In fine, it would have avenged the injuries we had received, and taught a lesson which more than one European power required; it would have preserved us from the depredations which continued through Napoleon's career, in spite of the boasted treaty, and from the insolence with which he received our ministers, and, most of all, it would have destroyed forever the poisonous influence of French jacobinism in America; it would have united the country, consolidated the tottering fabric of its institutions, and crushed the factions by which it was torn.

Experience has shown that no party in a republic can maintain its influence when opposed to an existing war. The fate of the federalists was sealed by their hostility to that of 1812; the fate of the jacobins hung by the slender thread of Mr. Adams' decision in 1798. So convinced was Mr. Jefferson of this truth, that in spite of his oft repeated declaration that the destinies of freedom in Europe depended upon the success of France in her wars of conquest and subjugation, in spite of his bitter opposition to every, even defensive measure, he was most careful to impress his confederates with the necessity of supporting the administration in carrying out the war, if declared.