y law which pinched or irritated them, all law
and order would very soon go by the board. His action was one of the
great examples in government which he set the people of the United
States. He showed that we must never parley or haggle with sedition,
treason, or lawlessness, but must strike a blow that cannot be
parried, and at once. The Whiskey Insurrectionists may have imagined
that they were too remote to be reached in their western wilderness,
but he taught them a most salutary lesson that, as they were in the
Union, the power of the Union could and would reach them.

One of the matters which Washington could not have foreseen was the
outrageous abuse of the press, which surpassed in virulence and
indecency anything hitherto known in the United States. At first the
journalistic thugs took care not to vilify Washington personally,
but, as they became more outrageous, they spared neither him nor his
family. Freneau, Bache, and Giles were among the most malignant of
these infamous men; and most suspicious is it that two of them at
least were proteges of Thomas Jefferson. Once, when the attack was
particularly atrocious, and the average citizen might well be excused
if he believed that Jefferson wrote it, Jefferson, unmindful of the
full bearing of the French proverb, _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_, wrote
to Washington exculpating himself and protesting that he was not the
author of that particular attack, and added that he had never written
any article of that kind for the press. Many years later the editor of
that newspaper, one of the most shameless of the malignants, calmly
reported in a batch of reminiscences that Jefferson did contribute
many of the most flagrant articles. Senator Lodge, in commenting
on this affair, caustically remarks: "Strict veracity was not the
strongest characteristic of either Freneau or Jefferson, and it is
really of but little consequence whether Freneau was lying in his old
age or in the prime of life."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lodge, II, 223.]

An unbiassed searcher after truth to-day will find that the
circumstantial evidence runs very strongly against Jefferson. He
brought Freneau over from New York to Philadelphia, he knew the sort
of work that Freneau would and could do, he gave him an office in the
State Department, he probably discussed the topics which the "National
Gazette" was to take up, and he probably read the proof of the
articles which that paper was to publish. In his animosities th