lost not a moment in starting for Holland. In these modern days of
precision in travel, when we can translate space into time, the distance
between London and Amsterdam is eleven hours. It was accomplished by
Adams, after innumerable delays and vexations and no little danger, in
fifty-four days. The bankers had contrived, by ingenious excuses, to
keep the drafts from going to protest until the minister's arrival, but
the gazettes were full of the troubles of Congress and the bickerings
of the states, and everybody was suspicious. Adams applied in vain to
the regency of Amsterdam. The promise of the American government was not
regarded as valid security for a sum equivalent to about three hundred
thousand dollars. The members of the regency were polite, but
inexorable. They could not make a loan on such terms; it was
unbusinesslike and contrary to precedent. Finding them immovable, Adams
was forced to apply to professional usurers and Jew brokers, from whom,
after three weeks of perplexity and humiliation, he obtained a loan at
exorbitant interest, and succeeded in meeting the drafts. It was only
too plain, as he mournfully confessed, that American credit was dead.
Such were the trials of our American ministers in Europe in the dark
days of the League of Friendship. It was not a solitary, but a typical,
instance. John Jay's experience at the unfriendly court of Spain was
perhaps even more trying.

[Sidenote: The Barbary pirates.]

European governments might treat us with cold disdain, and European
bankers might pronounce our securities worthless, but there was one
quarter of the world from which even worse measure was meted out to us.
Of all the barbarous communities with which the civilized world has had
to deal in modern times, perhaps none have made so much trouble as the
Mussulman states on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. After the
breaking up of the great Moorish kingdoms of the Middle Ages, this
region had fallen under the nominal control of the Turkish sultans as
lords paramount of the orthodox Mohammedan world. Its miserable
populations became the prey of banditti. Swarms of half-savage
chieftains settled down upon the land like locusts, and out of such a
pandemonium of robbery and murder as has scarcely been equalled in
historic times the pirate states of Morocco and Algiers, Tunis and
Tripoli, gradually emerged. Of these communities history has not one
good word to say. In these fair lands, once illus