the American case, is the longest and the ablest of his official papers. There is good reason to believe that it convinced Mr. Hammond; and we know that a large number of Jefferson's political opponents owned, that, whatever errors he may have committed in his public life, he was a great man when he argued the cause of his country against the honest misconceptions of the British minister. "He is only fit for a secretary of state," they would say, when his name was mentioned in connection with places more eminent. In this paper he proved by original documents, that "the treaty of 1783 was violated in England before it was known in America, and in America as soon as known, and that, too, in points so essential, as that, without them, it never would have been concluded." He also showed, by an array of documentary evidence, that "the recovery of the debts was obstructed validly in none of our States, invalidly only in a few, and that not till after the infractions committed on the other side." This despatch is perhaps unsurpassed among the diplomatic documents of recent times for the thoroughness with which the work undertaken was performed. Its tranquil, dispassionate tone, and its freedom from every thing that could irritate the self-love of the English government or the English people, are as remarkable as the perfect frankness and fulness with which the rights of his country are stated.

Jefferson invited Mr. Hammond to a "solo dinner" on the subject, a few days after the delivery of this despatch, when they conversed on the points at issue in the most open and friendly manner. The British minister admitted that the idea of England having committed the first infraction was a new element in the controversy. His court had never heard of it; and it "gave the case a complexion so entirely new and different from what had been contemplated, that he should not be justified in taking a single step." He could only send the despatch across the ocean, and await further instructions. From the whole of this conversation, Jefferson derived the impression, that the English government "had entertained no thought of ever giving up the posts." Toward the close of the interview, Mr. Hammond suggested the idea of neither party having fortified posts on the frontier, but trading-posts only; which, says Jefferson, "accorded well with two favorite ideas of mine, of leaving commerce free, and never keeping an unnecessary soldier."

Mr. Jefferson's despatch of two hundred and fifty manuscript

pages made its way to Downing Street, but not to the brain or the conscience of George III. Nothing came of it. The controversy remained open during the whole period of his tenure of office. He sent in, at last, his report, recommending commercial retaliation, but only to have the scheme defeated, as he always supposed by his colleague.

And we must keep in mind, that while these two gentlemen, Hammond and Jefferson, calmly conversed over their wine on these subjects, there was an American people whose conversation upon them was the farthest possible from being tranquil. The people might not be up in their Puffendorf, nor was Vattel often seen on the family table; but the St. Clair massacre struck horror to the coldest heart, and excited reflections in the dullest head. Every one could enter into such cases as that of Hugh Purdie, a native of Virginia, impressed in London streets, carried to sea in a man-ofwar, ordered to be released by the admiralty, put in irons and flogged after those orders had been received, and set on shore in a strange land without the means of subsisting for a day. It took fifty years to get the hatred out of the hearts of the American people which was engendered, not so much by the war, as by this insolent persistence in outrage after the war.

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS.

MEANWHILE the Revolution in France, followed at first with universal approval, was becoming an element of discord in the politics of the country; and nowhere were the questions involved discussed so warmly as in President Washington's cabinet. An accident revealed to the public in 1791 Jefferson's complete sympathy with the French people, placed him distinctly at the head of the popular party, and made him, at length, president of the United States.

At first, I repeat, all classes in all countries seemed to hail the proceedings of the French people as the beginning of a better day for France and for man: even kings, nobles, and the other classes most obviously interested in the existing system, cherished or affected a sentimental approval of the ideas most subversive of it. The destruction of the Bastille shook off from the popular party all such adherents. "The time of illusions is past," wrote the queen of France to Madame de Polignac, "and to-day we pay dear for our infatuation and enthusiasm for the American war." But it was not from the party assailed that the first protest reached the ear of Christendom. It was from a man whose whole public life had been a struggle against despotic principles, the most eloquent defender America ever had in Europe, Edmund Burke. From an Early period - as soon, indeed, as the king and queen of France had been brought face to face with the Revolution in that wild march from Versailles to Paris — he had recoiled from it with a horror which only his own mighty pen could express.

In November, 1789, Dr. Richard Price, an honored member of Franklin's familiar London circle, published his famous sermon on Love of Country, in which he applied the example of France to the case of England, maintaining the principle now so familiar, that

government is, properly, the creature and servant of the people. It was in reply to this discourse that Edmund Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, four hundred pages of rhapsody and passion, invested with the potent charm of his inthralling style. It was a sorry lapse from the Edmund Burke of the Stampact nights in the House of Commons. The work was so weak in argument, of substance so flimsy and transparent, as really to give some slight show of probability to the dastardly charge, that his motives in writing it were not disinterested. But we ought not to doubt that this poor pamphlet was the faithful expression of his state of mind at the time. In 1773, during a recess of Parliament, he had had a joyous holiday in France, when he saw all that was brightest and most bewitching there, in court and salon, in town and country, himself honored as the great orator of the British Parliament. Only the most pleasing recollections of that happy time lingered in his memory.

"It is now," he wrote in his Reflections, "sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. O what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate, without emotion, that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that

sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

What a Celtic fluency and gorgeousness in these false, false words! In the composition of such a piece, how necessary an ingredient is that remoteness from the object depicted which veils all of it which is not enchanting! In this whole pamphlet, the agony and shame and panic-terror of fair France, how small and slight they seem compared with the discomfort endured by one Austrian woman rudely interrupted in her career of ignoble pleasures! Mr. Burke, too, had known personally many of the French nobility; and he had found them "tolerably well-bred," "frank and open," "with a good military tone, and reasonably tinctured with literature." "As to their behavior to the inferior classes, they appeared to me to comport themselves toward them with goodnature," and "I could not discover that their agreements with their farmers were oppressive." In speaking of the great multitude of industrious and frugal persons, whose toil maintained those tolerably well-bred nobles of a good military tone; in speaking, I say, of THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE, whom king and nobility had had in charge for a thousand years, and had permitted to remain grossly ignorant and squalidly poor, he used expressions surcharged with the most insolent and inhuman contempt. The march from Versailles to the Tuileries, he said, was like "a procession of American savages entering into Onondaga, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves;" and he said, also, that when the nobles and priests had been expelled from France, learning itself would be "trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude." This hideous expression (which admitted more than the worst enemies of nobles and priests had ever charged against them) rang through Europe, imbittering every generous heart and maddening every excited head.

Never had pamphlet such success with the class it was written to please. George III., of his own motion, settled upon the author, whom he had hated for twenty-six years, a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year, and soon after a second pension of twentyfive hundred pounds a year. The king had also a number of copies