uncertainty, too, as to just what matters came under the department's authority, but it was the general impression that, in addition to foreign affairs, it should have charge of whatever domestic business did not fall distinctly under the heads of war and finance. Washington assured Jefferson, who was rather alarmed at the prospective demands of the office, that the duties would probably not be so arduous and multifarious as he imagined; and that if the domestic business should prove burdensome, "a further arrangement or division of the office could be made." An examination of the rather uninteresting list of "domestic" subjects on which Jefferson gave the President his written opinion as secretary of state shows how wide the range of his activities was, and how imperfect was the delimitation of the duties of the members of the cabinet. To-day a secretary of state does not publish his opinions on finance, nor a secretary of the navy advise on the management of the post-office, but Jefferson reported, among other matters, on the validity of Indian land grants made by the State of Georgia, on the payment of soldiers' accounts, on the right of the President to veto a bill fixing the residence of Congress, on Indian trade, on the foreign debt, on the establishment of a bank of the United States, on the disposition of western lands, and on the encouragement of the useful arts. Under the Confederation there had been a secretary of

foreign affairs, but the new Congress judged-by a pardonable inference from the negligibility of our country in the European councils since the peacethat our foreign diplomacy could be taken care of without much additional burden by the secretary who managed a large number of home affairs. The work that was then thought to be incidental came soon to be absorbing and all-important, for the very slight and occasional contact between our national and our State governments has made a secretary of state for home affairs (after the English model) almost a superfluity, while our foreign relations have grown in delicacy and complexity until the secretary of state has become the most important member of the President's cabinet.

Of all our diplomatists, after the peerless Franklin, Jefferson was the best fitted for this post. He was more supple than Jay, more tactful than Adams, more resourceful than Pinckney, more constructive than Morris. His five years residence in Paris, the centre of European diplomacy, had furnished his receptive mind with a full knowledge of the currents of political thought and commercial ambitions in the Old World. His preference for France was acknowledged, and it arose from a variety of causes. First of all, gratitude. He could see no justice, as he wrote Madison in 1789, in viewing two nations with identical feelings when one had spent her blood and money to save us, while the other had "moved

heaven and earth and hell to exterminate us in war, insulted us in all her councils in peace, shut her doors to us in every port where her interests would admit it, and libelled us among foreign nations." The memory of the "ungracious notice," which George III and his Queen had given him on the occasion of his visit to London in 1786 to confer with John Adams, threw into bright relief the courtesy and amiability of the French Court and ministers. He was convinced, too, that the cultivation of closer commercial relations with France would not only open wide markets for our products among her 25,000,000 inhabitants, but would also force Great Britain to modify her harsh navigation acts against us if she wished to keep her just share of our trade. In the French restrictions on our commerce Jefferson saw only a mistaken economic policy, but in the British navigation acts he saw a deliberate purpose to monopolize and control our commerce.

Then, again, Jefferson's genuine passion for democracy made him hail the French Revolution as the dawn of a new era in Europe. He hated kings and aristocracies. "I continue eternally attached to the principles of your Revolution," he wrote to Brissot de Warville in May, 1793, even after the news of the king's execution and the declaration of war against England had reached America. And to Pendleton he wrote: "The success of the French Revolution will ensure the progress of liberty in

Europe and its preservation here." He was looking with great anxiety, during his whole term of office as secretary of state, for the establishment of the new government in France, convinced that it would be the purveyor of liberty to all the nations of the Old World. Finally, to these reasons of public consideration must be added Jefferson's personal “compatibility of temper" with things French. He liked their art and music, their wit and grace, their clarity of thought and courtesy of speech, their cheerfulness, their language, their books, their dress, and their wines.

For all this, it is most unjust to say, as McMaster does, that "Jefferson was at all times more French than American." His preference for France was rather in comparison with England than with his native land. No one can read the hundreds of letters which Jefferson wrote from Paris to his friends in America and be left with any doubt where his affections were. "I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here," he wrote to Monroe in June, 1785. . . . "It will make you adore your own country, its soil, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners." He is never tired of contrasting the free opportunities of the new American Republic with the caste and privilege in European society. And if he hails the France of 1789 with enthusiasm it is first of all because he sees promise that she may become free like us.

"The French nation," he writes to Washington in December, 1788, "has been awakened by our Revolution. They feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde." Jefferson has been represented by many historians and biographers, from John Marshall down, as applying the touchstone of French (and even "Jacobinical") principles as the test of true Americanism. The exact opposite is the truth. He tested the French Revolution by the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, and felt, as he wrote Edward Rutledge, in 1791, that the success or failure of those principles in France meant their confirmation or their weakening in America.

The foreign questions with which Jefferson had to deal as secretary of state were bequeathed to him from the days of the Confederation. They arose almost entirely out of the diplomacy of the American Revolution and the peace negotiations of 1783, and were referable to three main categories: the attainment of a suitable commercial status with the nations of Europe, the adjustment of our relations with neighboring possessions of European countries on this continent, and the expediency of our participation or even our partisanship in the great cycle of European wars precipitated by the French Revolution. Not one of these three questions was settled during Jefferson's occupancy of the