ng 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.

In the spring of 1793 the French Republic appointed Edmond Charles
Genet, familiarly called "Citizen Genet," Minister to the United
States. He was a young man, not more than thirty, of very quick parts,
who had been brought up in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, had an
exorbitant idea of his own importance, and might be described without
malice as a master of effrontery. The ship which brought him to this
country was driven by adverse w