oubt that a negotiator so patriotic, firm, and wise as John
Jay had earnestly sought to make the best of a difficult cause, or that
he was 'clear in his great office'--an office reluctantly accepted. It
has been well said of Jay's treaty that 'now few defend it on principle,
many on policy.' When its ratification was advised by the Senate, and it
became public, the whole country was aroused; all the latent venom of
partisan hate and all the wise forbearance of patriotic self-possession
were arrayed face to face in so fierce an opposition that Washington
justly described the period as 'a momentous crisis.' It was denounced as
cowardly; it was defended as expedient; copies were publicly destroyed
amid shouts of exultation: Jay was burned in effigy; the Boston Chamber
of Commerce voted in favor of its ratification: Hamilton, under the
signature of 'Camillus,' analyzed its claims, and deprecated the bitter
hostility it had evoked; and Fisher Ames, in pleading for moderation to
both parties, in the House of Representatives, embalmed his patriotic
counsel with such heroic patience and eloquent references to his
approaching end, that his speech became one of the standard exemplars of
American eloquence.

'When the fiery vapors of the war lowered in the skirts of our
horizon,' he observes, 'all our wishes were concentred in this
one--that we might escape the desolation of the storm: this treaty,
like a rainbow on the edge of the storm, marked to our eyes the
space where it was raging, and afforded, at the same time, the sure
prognostic of fair weather: if we reject it, the vivid colors will
grow pale; it will be a baleful meteor, portending tempest and
war.'

And he ends this remarkable speech in these words:

'I have thus been led by my feelings to speak more at length than I
had intended. Yet I have perhaps as little personal interest in the
event as any one here. There is, I believe, no member who will not
think his chance to be a witness of the consequences greater than
mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject, and a spirit
should rise, as it will, with the public disorders, to make
confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as my
hold upon life is, may outlive the Government and Constitution of
my country.'

Jay's own remarks on the subject in his private correspondence, are
characteristic alike of his recti