contagious documents ever drawn up.  Going to France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he found the French nation about to put into practice the principles on which he had long fed his imagination—­principles which he accepted without qualification and without scruple.  Returning to America after the organization of the Government, he accepted with evident reluctance the position of Secretary of State which Washington offered to him.  In the Cabinet his chief adversary or competitor was Alexander Hamilton, his junior by fourteen years, a man equally versatile and equally facile—­and still more enthralling as an orator.  Hamilton harbored the anxiety that the United States under their new Constitution would be too loosely held together.  He promoted, therefore, every measure that tended to strengthen the Central Government and to save it from dissolution either by the collapse of its unifying bonds or by anarchy.  In the work of the first two years of Washington’s administration, Hamilton was plainly victorious.  The Tariff Law, the Excise, the National Bank, the National Funding Bill, all centralizing measures, were his.  Washington approved them all, and we may believe that he talked them over with Hamilton and gave them his approval before they came under public discussion.

Thus, as Hamilton gained, Jefferson plainly lost.  But Washington did not abandon his sound position as a neutral between the two.  He requested Jefferson and Edmund Randolph to draw up objections to some of Hamilton’s schemes, so that he had in writing the arguments of very strong opponents.

Meanwhile the French Revolution had broken all bounds, and Jefferson, as the sponsor of the French over here, was kept busy in explaining and defending the Gallic horrors.  The Americans were in a large sense law-abiding, but in another sense they were lawless.  Nevertheless, they heard with horror of the atrocities of the French Revolutionists—­of the drownings, of the guillotining, of the imprisonment and execution of the King and Queen—­and they had a healthy distrust of the Jacobin Party, which boasted that these things were natural accompaniments of Liberty with which they planned to conquer the world.  Events in France inevitably drove that country into war with England.  Washington and his chief advisers believed that the United States ought to remain neutral as between the two belligerents.  But neutrality was difficult.  In spite of their horror at the French Revolution, the memory of our debt to France during our own Revolution made a very strong bond of sympathy, whereas our long record of hostility to England during our Colony days, and since the Declaration of Independence, kept alive a traditional hatred for Great Britain.  While it was easy, therefore, to preach neutrality, it was very difficult to enforce it.  An occurrence which could not have been foreseen further added to the difficulty of neutrality.