t conceive him too careless
to attend to them, or too stupid to understand them." Again, some months
later, the President, alluding to another article in Freneau's
paper,--that "rascal Freneau," as he called him,--said "that he despised
all their attacks on him personally, but there never had been an act of
the government--not meaning in the executive line only, but in any
line--which that paper had not abused. He was evidently sore and warm,"
continues the candid secretary, "and I took his intention to be, that I
should interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his
appointment of translating clerk in my office. But I will not do it."

These frank and indignant avowals of feeling and opinion were not, if we
may believe Jefferson, unusual with Washington, even in cabinet
meetings; and it seems hardly likely that Madison, who was on the most
friendly and intimate terms with the President, could have been so
ignorant of how he felt and thought as to suppose him the mere dupe of
designing men. The truth is, probably, that Madison did not, any more
than Jefferson, believe this. It was only a bit of party tactics to
assume, lest the President should have too much influence over the minds
of the people, that, in the hands of the wicked "Anglicists," he was as
clay in the hands of the potter. The two friends, whether in writing or
by speech they lamented and excused the unhappy position, as they were
pleased to call it, of the President, must have appeared to each other
like the Roman augurs in Gerome's picture.

CHAPTER XIV

HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS

Genet was at last got rid of, but the evil that he did lived after him.
His presence had provoked an outbreak, to some degree, of the phenomena
of the French Revolution, which, however significant they might be in
the upheaval of an old monarchical despotism, were an unwholesome growth
among a simple people, where one man was as good as another before the
law; where, from the first settlement of the country, all had largely
possessed the advantages of a popular government; and where any other
than a republican government for the future was wellnigh impossible. For
men to address each other as "citizen," as if the word had the new
significance in America that it had just gained in France; to swear
eternal fidelity to liberty, equality, and fraternity, as if these were
lately discovered rights which had been denied the common people for
centuries by kings