and bring on a British war as well.  And the prospect did look encouragingly black in the West, where the American general Wayne was ready waiting south of Lake Erie, while the trade in scalps was unusually brisk.  Forty dollars was the regular market price for an ordinary Indian’s scalp.  But as much as a thousand was offered for Simon Girty’s in the hope of getting that inconvenient British scout put quickly out of the way.  Nearer home Jefferson and his band of demagogues had other arguments as well.  The Federal North would suffer most by war, while the Republican South might use war as a means of repudiating all the debts she owed to Englishmen.  This would have been a very different thing from the insolvency of the Continental Congress during the Revolution.  It was dire want, not financial infamy, that made the Revolutionary paper money ‘not worth a Continental.’  But it would have been sheer theft for the Jeffersonian South to have made its honest obligations ‘rotten as a Pennsylvanian bond.’

The wild French-Revolutionary rage that swept through the South now fanned the flame and made the sparks fly over into Canada.  In April 1793 a fiery Red Republican, named Genet, landed at Charleston as French minister to the United States and made a triumphal progress to Philadelphia.  Nobody bothered about the fundamental differences between the French and American revolutions.  France and England were going to war and that was enough.  Genet was one of those ‘impossibles’ whom revolutions throw into ridiculous power.  When he began his campaign the Republican South was at his feet.  Planters and legislators donned caps of liberty and danced themselves so crazy over the rights of abstract man that they had no enthusiasm left for such concrete instances as Loyalists, Englishmen, and their own plantation slaves.  Then Genet made his next step in the new diplomacy by fitting out French privateers in American harbours and seizing British vessels in American waters.  This brought Washington down on him at once.  Then he lost his head completely, abused everybody, including Jefferson, and retired from public life as an American citizen, being afraid to go home.

Genet’s absurd career was short, but very meteoric while it lasted, and full of anti-British mischief-making.  His agents were everywhere; and his successor, Adet, carried on the underground agitation with equal zeal and more astuteness.  Vermont offered an excellent base of operations.  Finding that its British proclivities had not produced the Chambly canal for its trade with the St Lawrence, it had become more violently anti-British than ever before and even proposed taking Canada single-handed.  This time its new policy remained at fever heat for over three years and only cooled down when a British man-of-war captured the incongruously named Olive Branch, in which Ira Allen was trying to run the blockade from Ostend with twenty thousand muskets and other arms which