ly alive. He saw dangers
to the state lurking in every recess where the full light of clear
perceptions did not fall. "I found a state of things," he wrote some
years afterward, "which, of all I had contemplated, I least expected. I
had left France in the first year of her revolution, in the fervor of
natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to
these rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and
excited by daily exercise. The president received me cordially, and my
colleagues and circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The
courtesies of dinner-parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among
them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I can not
describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations
filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly
over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An
apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself, for
the most part, the only advocate on the republican side of the question,
unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party
from the legislative houses."

That there were men of character in the United States at that time who
desired a monarchical form of government, evidence is not wanting. Some
of them had been loyalists during the war. Washington spoke of them in
1787, before the assembling of the convention that framed the federal
constitution, as men who either had "not consulted the public mind," or
who lived "in a region more productive of monarchical ideas than was the
case in the southern states." But that any officer of the government, on
Jefferson's arrival, had a desire for kingly rule, there is no positive
evidence. The most earnest advocate for a strong, energetic,
consolidated government, was Alexander Hamilton; yet he never expressed
a _desire_ for a monarchical government in America. In his speech in
the constitutional convention on the eighteenth of June, 1787, he lauded
the British constitution as the best ever devised by man, and said that
he doubted whether anything short of a government like that of Great
Britain (a constitutional monarchy) would do in America. These
sentiments were uttered when everything like order appeared to be on the
verge of destruction, and a strong arm, independent of the popular will,
seemed necessary for the establishment of public strength and individual
security. The cr