France; and without going to
any other source it followed naturally from the message of
the President to Congress, when he nominated Jay upon that
mission. The secretary of Mr. Jay came to Paris soon after
the treaty with England had been concluded, and brought with
him a copy of Mr. Jay's instructions, which he offered to
shew to me as _justification of Jay_. I advised him, as a
friend, not to shew them to anybody, and did not permit him
to shew them to me. "Who is it," said I to him, "that you
intend to implicate as censureable by shewing those
instructions? Perhaps that implication may fall upon your
own government." Though I did not see the instructions, I
could not be at a loss to understand that the American
administration had been playing a double game.--Author.

That there was a "double game" in this business, from first
to last, is now a fact of history. Jay was confirmed by the
Senate on a declaration of the President in which no
faintest hint of a treaty was given, but only the
"adjustment of our complaints," "vindication of our rights,"
and cultivation of "peace." Only after the Envoy's
confirmation did the Cabinet add the main thing, his
authority to negotiate a commercial treaty. This was done
against the protest of the only lawyer among them, Edmund
Randolph, Secretary of State, who said the exercise of such
a power by Jay would be an abridgment of the rights of the
Senate and of the nation. See my "Life of Randolph," p. 220.
For Jay's Instructions, etc., see I. Am. State Papers,
Foreign Relations.--Editor.

It is curious to observe, how the appearance of characters will change,
whilst the root that produces them remains the same. The Washington
faction having waded through the slough of negociation, and whilst it
amused France with professions of friendship contrived to injure her,
immediately throws off the hypocrite, and assumes the swaggering air of
a bravado. The party papers of that imbecile administration were on
this occasion filled with paragraphs about _Sovereignty_. A paltroon may
boast of his sovereign right to let another kick him, and this is the
only kind of sovereignty shewn in the treaty with England. But those
daring paragraphs, as Timothy Pickering(1) well knows, were intended
for France; without whose assistance, in men, money, and ships, Mr.
Washi