in this country could rejoice over the victory of Valmy together, or shudder at the slaughter of the aristocrats. They could chant the carmagnole or quote Burke's mournful prophecies with the detachment of distant, if interested, observers. But when Great Britain was drawn into the conflict the war came home to us; for Great Britain ruled our commerce. We proclaimed neutrality and rebuked Genêt. But neutrality was hard to keep.

The French Republic immediately threw open the French West Indian ports to our ships, a piece of crafty generosity to prevent the islands from being starved when England's powerful navy should cut them off from the French trade. Great Britain, invoking the "Rule of 1756," which forbade a belligerent to open its ports to a nation to whom they had been closed in time of peace, refused to regard our trade with the French Indies as "neutral." She seized hundreds of our vessels, condemned the cargoes, destroyed the ships, maltreated and imprisoned the seamen, or impressed them into service on British men-of-war. Orders in Council of the summer and autumn of 1793 instructed British captains first to stop vessels loaded with corn, flour, or meal bound for France, and later all ships carrying products of the French colonies or conveying food to French colonies. This arbitrary extension of the list of contraband of war was a violation of the code of international law. It aimed at the

starvation of France. Great Britain determined that in this war "there should be no neutrals.'

In the early spring of 1794 war with Great Britain seemed inevitable, even to "most of our good, cool men of Boston," as a merchant of that town wrote to Secretary Knox. Dayton, of New Jersey, proposed in Congress that debts due to English subjects be sequestrated and the amount paid into the treasury of the United States to indemnify the American merchants who had been despoiled by England's cruisers. A bill to suspend all commercial intercourse with Great Britain until she made reparation for her aggressions and delivered up the Western fur-posts which she still held in defiance of the treaty of 1783, was defeated only by the casting vote of John Adams in the Senate. Lord Dorchester, the governor of Canada, added fuel to the flames by a speech to a delegation of hostile Indians of our Northwest, in which he tried to rouse them to a campaign to regain their lost lands by telling them that it was probable that England and America would be at war within a year. Congress voted bills to fortify our harbors and build frigates. The artillery service was strengthened and a levy of eighty thousand militia authorized. The seaport towns sent memorials to Congress breathing defiance. Three thousand men actually began to drill at Marblehead, Massachusetts.

But other counsels prevailed. To avoid both

war and the interruption of our commerce with England, Washington sent John Jay, chief justice of the supreme court, as envoy extraordinary to London to smooth out our difficulties. The treaty which Jay brought home after several months labor with the British ministers was more meagre even than the proverbial "half a loaf." It was silent on the major questions of impressments and the repeal of the odious Orders in Council, and granted only niggardly concessions to our West Indian traders. It was so unpopular in the seaport towns that Jay was burned in effigy in Boston and Hamilton was struck in the face by a brick-bat while defending it in an open-air meeting at New York. Yet it was ratified, by the bare two-thirds vote of the Senate necessary, in deference to Washington's conviction that the alternative was a war with Great Britain, which we could ill afford to wage.

Naturally, the Republicans made great capital out of the Jay Treaty. They had a rejoinder now to the charge of their subserviency to France in the days of the Genêt mission. "Mr. Jay's representation was not in the stile of a firm demand for compensation for injuries done to our citizens," wrote a prominent Republican lawyer of Virginia to Madison, "but rather supplicating the benevolence of his Brittanic Majesty for relief." Jefferson called the treaty "an execrable thing," "an infamous act which is really nothing more [less] than a treaty of

alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the Legislature1 and the people of the United States." He maintained that a policy of firmness, by which he meant enforcement of nonintercourse, would have brought England to terms. In the light of his policy of "firmness" when applied a dozen years later by President Jefferson, we can see the superior wisdom of Washington's course, but to the Republicans of 1794 Jefferson's untested theory carried the recommendation of the prestige of his name. And they were fortified in their contention that the treaty embroiled rather than ameliorated our foreign relations, by alienating our only friend in the vain attempt to conciliate our most dangerous enemy, when news came of its reception in France.

James Monroe, a Virginia Republican, had been appointed minister to the French Republic at the same time that Jay was sent to England. His instructions contained the superfluous injunction to cultivate good relations with France, and expressly warranted him to say that the projected negotiations with Great Britain concerned only the settlement of

1 Because the lower house of Congress had passed a non-intercourse act with Great Britain, which was defeated only by John Adams's casting vote in the Senate. Jefferson wrote sarcastically of this vote: "The Senate was intended as a check on the will of the Representatives when too hasty. They are not only that, but completely so on the will of the people. I have never known a measure more universally desired by the people than the passage of that bill."

some controversies arising out of the interpretation of the treaty of peace of 1783, and would in no wise impair our alliance of 1778 with France. The negotiation, then, of a new treaty with Great Britain which seemed to make us her accomplice in a predatory war on French commerce, appeared with not a little show of justice to the government at Paris as an unfriendly and even a treacherous act. It greatly embarrassed Monroe, who had given hostages to the French Republic in the shape of extraordinary protestations of sympathy. Whether he sinned more against diplomatic reserve than he was sinned against by Federalist disavowal is a question which his friends and his opponents have not ceased to argue. At any rate, after reading some sharp letters of rebuke from the acrid pen of Secretary Pickering, he was recalled by Washington, and returned to America to contribute his bit to the Republican cause by the publication of an apology for his conduct in a volume of over five hundred pages. Needless to say, Jefferson did not discourage its sale.

While Jay was busy negotiating his treaty an event occurred at home which furnished more grist for the Republican mill. Hamilton's excise tax, ever since its passage in 1791, had been resisted by the distillers of the back counties in the Central and Southern States. The whiskey which they made was not merely a deleterious luxury. It