to them than it afterwards made to the Texans.  So it was with Aaron Burr.  His conspiracy was merely one, and by no means the most dangerous, of the various conspiracies in which men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and many of the members of the early Democratic societies in Kentucky, bore a part.  It was rendered possible only by the temper of the people and by the peculiar circumstances which also rendered the earlier conspiracies possible; and it came to naught for the same reasons that they came to naught, and was even more hopeless, because it was undertaken later, when the conditions were less favorable.

    Clark’s Part in the Proposed French Attack on Spain.

The movement deliberately entered into by many of the Kentuckians in the years 1793 and 1794, to conquer Louisiana on behalf of France, must be treated in this way.  The leader in this movement was George Rogers Clark.  His chance of success arose from the fact that there were on the frontier many men of restless, adventurous, warlike type, who felt a spirit of unruly defiance toward the home government and who greedily eyed the rich Spanish lands.  Whether they got the lands by conquest or by colonization, and whether they warred under one flag or another, was to them a matter of little moment.  Clark’s career is of itself sufficient to prove the truth of this.  He had already been at the head of a movement to make war against the Spaniards, in defiance of the Central Government, on behalf of the Western settlements.  On another occasion he had offered his sword to the Spanish Government, and had requested permission to found in Spanish territory a State which should be tributary to Spain and a barrier against the American advance.  He had thus already sought to lead the Westerners against Spain in a warfare undertaken purely by themselves and for their own objects, and had also offered to form by the help of some of these Westerners a State which should be a constituent portion of the Spanish dominion.  He now readily undertook the task of raising an army of Westerners to overrun Louisiana in the interests of the French Republic.  The conditions which rendered possible these various movements were substantially the same, although the immediate causes, or occasions, were different.  In any event the result would ultimately have been the conquest of the Spanish dominions by the armed frontiersmen, and the upbuilding of English-speaking States on Spanish territory.

    The American Sympathizers with the French Revolution.

The expedition which at the moment Clark proposed to head took its peculiar shape from outside causes.  At this period Genet was in the midst of his preposterous career as Minister from the French Republic to the United States.  The various bodies of men who afterwards coalesced into the Democratic-Republican party were frantically in favor of the French Revolution, regarding it with a fatuous admiration quite as foolish as the