with which he had followed his object, alike unmindful of the objections of the cautious, the hesitation of the timid, the doubts of the lukewarm, and the stratagems of the hostile. It is this quality which marks Mr. Adams's career as a statesman through all its various phases with the stamp of greatness. In the arts of indirection, the mere management and manœuvring of politics or diplomacy, he never had the smallest skill; but in the faculty of combining means with judgment and energy so as to attain the public end he had in view, down to the close of his public life, he showed himself a master. And nowhere is this made to appear more strikingly than in his correspondence with M. Dumas and others through whom he acted during the period now under consideration in Holland. After it was all over, he wrote to his wife at home, briefly contrasting the difficulties experienced in the only two countries in which America had as yet been successful, in the following terms:

"The embassy here has done great things. It has not merely tempted a natural rival, and an imbittered, inveterate, hereditary enemy to assist a little against Great Britain, but it has torn from her bosom a constant, faithful friend and ally of a hundred years' duration. It has not only prevailed with a minister or an absolute court to fall in with the national prejudice, but without money, without friends, and in opposition to mean intrigue, it has carried its cause, by the still small voice of reason and persuasion, triumphantly against the uninterrupted opposition of family connections, court influence, and aristocratical despotism.”

His labors were not intermitted by this event, for he entered forthwith upon measures likely to render it of the most service to America. This was the favorable moment for resuming his conferences with bankers and capitalists, and he improved it. So long as the recognition of the United States had remained in doubt, even though the current of events had been removing more and more every prospect of the reëstablishment of the authority of Great Britain, there was little heart among the moneyed men to undertake, or the people at large to second any pecuniary advances. But now that the States General had decided to give countenance to the new nation, Mr. Adams felt the difference, in the reception of offers from several of the most responsible houses in Holland to undertake a loan. It is needless to go into the details of the negotiations that followed.

The papers that relate to them are most of them given in the volumes of this work devoted to the official correspondence. It is enough here to say that through the activity of three houses, Messrs. Willink, Van Staphorst, and De la Lande & Fynje, a sum of five millions of guilders was obtained, at a moment when it was of essential service in maintaining the overstrained credit of the United States.

Nor yet did this beneficial interposition of Holland stop with the first loan. When America, at the close of seven years of war, was exhausted, and gasping for breath, the funds which she was enabled, for a time, to draw from this source were most opportune to keep her from sinking altogether. France, to whom alone she had been able to look for aid in the early stages of the contest, was beginning to give signs of the distress which resulted so deplorably afterwards. From the date of the first successful loan until Mr. Adams returned to America, in 1788, he kept up his relations with the bankers of Amsterdam, and through them succeeded in procuring successive advances, which carried his country safely over the interval of disorder previous to the consolidation of the federal government. This great step, once taken, soon rendered further assistance unnecessary. The people began to gather up their resources, and to pour, almost without an effort, into the coffers of the treasury sufficient sums to pay their Dutch friends an ample compensation for the confidence they had been willing to extend in their hour of need. And in witnessing this process, no one enjoyed a more unmingled satisfaction than Mr. Adams. To him who had done so much to persuade the Dutchmen to trust the honor of his countrymen, the sense that these had redeemed all the pledges he ventured to give for them, was even more gratifying to his pride than if he had been acquitting a personal obligation of his own:

Neither did another great measure linger long unexecuted. On the very day that Mr. Adams was received by the States General, he presented a memorial, stating that he was authorized by his government to propose a treaty of amity and commerce between the two republics, and soliciting the nomination of some person or persons on the part of the States with full powers to treat. That body acceded to the request at once, and appointed a committee before whom Mr. Adams laid a

project which he had prepared, in conformity with the instructions he had received from congress. So slow, however, were the forms of transacting business under the system of that cautious people that, notwithstanding the trifling nature of the obstacles in the way of a perfect agreement, nearly five months elapsed before the negotiations were concluded, and nearly another month passed before the treaties were ready for execution. At last, on the 7th of October, 1782, the last hand was put to the papers, and Mr. Adams had the satisfaction of sending Mr. Livingston for ratification the second alliance entered into by the United States as a sovereign power. The two events, of the recognition of the United States, and of the signature of a treaty with them, were deemed of such interest that an artist in Holland thought them worthy of being commemorated by the execution of two medals, the designs upon which have been engraved, and will be found in the seventh and eighth volumes of the present work.

Such is the history of the negotiation in Holland. A history which, whether we consider the difficulties to be vanquished, the means at his disposal, the energy and perseverance to be exerted or the prudence to be exercised to the attainment of the end, places Mr. Adams at once in the first class of diplomatists. The fact that it was executed on one of the lesser theatres of Europe, and was productive of only limited effects, does not in any way detract from the merits of the execution. Justly was it denominated by one who had spent his life in the diplomatic service, a "grand coup." And it deserved the more to be called so, because it was not struck by the modes often resorted to in courts. There were no arts or disguises, no flattery or fawning, no profligacy or corruption put in use to further the result. It was an honest victory of principle gained by skilfully enlisting in a just cause the confidence and sympathy of a nation. And it was won by a man who up to the fortieth year of his life had scarcely crossed the borders of the small province in America within which he was born, and who had had no opportunities to profit of those lessons on the radiant theatres of the world, which even the republican poet of England was willing to admit, in his time, to be

"Best school of best experience, quickest insight
In all things that to greatest actions lead."

Considering these circumstances, in connection with the fact that Mr. Adams was placed at once in the face of many of the most experienced and adroit statesmen in Europe, who viewed all his proceedings with distrust, if not disapprobation, although this event, if measured by its consequences, may not claim in itself so important a place in history as some others in which he took a decisive part, yet, as being the most exclusively the result of his own labors, it well merits to be ranked, in the way he ranked it, as the greatest triumph of his life.

CHAPTER VII.

THE NEGOTIATION AND SIGNATURE OF THE TREATY OF PEACE WITH GREAT BRITAIN.

THE moral trial described in the last chapter, was not yet entirely passed. It had only changed its form. Some time prior to the completion of the labors there narrated, the calls upon Mr. Adams to repair to another great scene of duty, opening at Paris, had become quite urgent. Not much disposed to be subject, without strong necessity, to a renewal of the rude and menacing tone which Count de Vergennes had not forborne again to use on his last visit, Mr. Adams waited to be convinced that the causes were sufficient to require his presence before he went. Nor was the necessity of putting the seal to the treaty, which he had succeeded in negotiating with the States of Holland, without its imperative force in favor of delay. He deemed it wise to make sure of it before he should leave the Hague. But, this great object once gained, he lost not a moment more. The fact had become by this time apparent that Great Britain was making some attempts at negotiation. Intimations had also been received of the occurrence of differences of opinion at Paris, which his intervention would be required to decide. These events contributed to quicken his movements, so that, on the 26th of October, 1782, he was again in the French capital. In order to comprehend the state of things he found there, it will be necessary to go back a little, and explain the several steps which led to the pacification.

Even before the decisive vote given in the House of Commons upon General Conway's motion, which snapped the chain by which Lord North had been so long held to his sovereign, and before that sovereign had been compelled to subject his recalcitrating will to the necessity of receiving the Whigs once more into his counsels, emissaries had been sent to the con