religious element, which always exasperates dissension, was present.  French Democrats had set up the Goddess of Reason (in private life Mme. Momoro) as an object of worship; American Democrats were accused of making Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason” their Bible; “Atheist” and “Infidel” were added to the epithets which the Federalists discharged at their foes.  So fierce and so general was the quarrel on this European ground, that a distinguished foreigner, then travelling in this country, said that he saw many French and English, but scarcely ever met with an American.  Weld, a more humble tourist, put into his book, that in Norfolk, Virginia, he found half the town ready to fight the other half on the French question.  Meanwhile, both French and English treated us with ill-disguised contempt, and inflicted open outrages upon our commerce.  But it made little difference.  One faction was willing to be kicked by England; and the other took a pleasure in being soufflete by France.  The rival flags were kept flying until the close of the war of 1812.

An outbreak of Democratic fury bordering upon treason took place, when Senator Mason of Virginia violated the oath of secrecy, and sent a copy of Jay’s treaty with England to the “Aurora.”  Meetings passed condemnatory resolutions expressed in no mild language.  Jay was “a slave, a traitor, a coward, who had bartered his country’s liberties for British gold.”  Mobs burned Jay in effigy, and pelted Alexander Hamilton.  At a public meeting in Philadelphia, Mr. Blair threw the treaty to the crowd, and advised them to kick it to hell.  They carried it on a pole in procession, and burned it before the English minister’s house.  A Democratic society in Richmond, Virginia, full of the true modern South Carolina “sound and fury,” gave public notice, that, if the treaty entered into by “that damned arch traitor, John Jay, with the British tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next General Assembly of Virginia praying that the said State may recede from the Union, and be left under the government and protection of one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians!” A meeting at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, resolved, “that it was weary of the tardiness of Congress in not going to war with England, and that they were almost ready to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and disgrace the government.”  Mr. Jefferson’s opinion of the treaty is well known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three lines, contains the adjectives, unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous, dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper, monarchical, impeachable.  The Mazzei letter, written not long after the ratification, displays the same bitter feeling.