Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/337

"I persuade myself," he wrote to Patrick Henry, "it has not escaped your observation that a crisis is approaching which must, if it cannot be arrested, soon decide whether order and good government shall be preserved, or anarchy and confusion ensue. I most religiously aver that I have no wish incompatible with the dignity, happiness, and true interest of the people of this country. My ardent desire is, and my aim has been, as far as depended upon the executive department, to comply strictly with all our engagements, foreign and domestic, but to keep the United States free from political connections with every other country, to see them independent of all, and under the influence of none. In a word, I want an American character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves, and not for others. This, in my judgment, is the only way to be respected abroad, and happy at home."

But a large proportion of the people, incapable of understanding how little the revolution in France resembled in principles our own war for independence, and never pausing to consider whether the inhabitants of that country were fit for self-government, did not doubt the ultimate success of French republicanism, and were easily led to regard all doubts in others as treason to the cause itself, and to stigmatize Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and all who sympathized with them, as "anglomen" and "monarchists." The history of politics affords no parallel of the impudent attempt to persuade the citizens of the United States that a conspiracy had been organized among them for the establishment of a kingly government. There was not the shadow of a shade of any suggestion of such a conspiracy in all the conduct and conversation of the parties alleged to be the conspirators, and no man of common sense now believes that their slanderers were ever actuated for a moment by any sincere suspicions or apprehensions on the subject.

With intelligence of the declaration of war by France against