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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
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