At last early in 1795 Jay returned.  His Treaty caused an uproar.  The hottest of his enemies found an easy explanation on the ground that he was a traitor.  Stanch Federalists suffered all varieties of mortification.  Washington himself entered into no discussion, but he ruminated over those which came to him.  I am not sure that he invented the phrase “Either the Treaty, or war,” which summed up the alternatives which confronted Jay; but he used it with convincing emphasis.  When it came before the Senate, both sides had gathered every available supporter, and the vote showed only a majority of one in its favor.  Still, it passed.  But that did not satisfy its pertinacious enemies.  Neither were they restrained by the President’s proclamation.  The Constitution assigned the duty of negotiating and ratifying treaties to the President and Senate; but to the perfervid Anti-Britishers the Constitution was no more than an old cobweb to be brushed away at pleasure.  The Jay Treaty could not be put into effect without money for expenses; all bills involving money must pass the House of Representatives; therefore, the House would actually control the operation of the Treaty.

The House at this time was Republican by a marked majority.  In March, 1796, the President laid the matter before the House.  In a twinkling the floodgates of speechifying burst open; the debates touched every aspect of the question.  James Madison, the wise supporter of Washington and Hamilton in earlier days and the fellow worker on “The Federalist,” led the Democrats in their furious attacks.  He was ably seconded by Albert Gallatin, the high-minded young Swiss doctrinaire from Geneva, a terrible man, in whose head principles became two-edged weapons with Calvinistic precision and mercilessness.  The Democrats requested the President to let them see the correspondence in reference to the Treaty during its preparation.  This he wisely declined to do.  The Constitution did not recognize their right to make the demand, and he foresaw that, if granted by him then, it might be used as a harmful precedent.

For many weeks the controversy waxed hot in the House.  Scores of speakers hammered at every argument, yet only one speech eclipsed all the rest, and remains now, after one hundred and thirty years, a paragon.  There are historians who assert that this was the greatest speech delivered in Congress before Daniel Webster spoke there—­an implication which might lead irreverent critics to whisper that too much reading may have dulled their discrimination.  But fortunately not only the text of the speech remains; we have also ample evidence of the effect it produced on its hearers.  Fisher Ames, a Representative from Massachusetts, uttered it.  He was a young lawyer, feeble in health, but burning, after the manner of some consumptives, with intellectual and moral fire which strangely belied his slender thread of physical life.  Ames pictured the horrors which would ensue if the Treaty were rejected.