wever, was too great
a man to be disturbed by the bad temper and narrow ideas
of English ministers. After his fashion he persevered in
what he knew to be right and for his country's interest, and in due
time a diplomatic representation was established, while later still,
in the midst of difficulties of which he little dreamed at the outset,
he carried through a treaty that removed the existing grievances. In a
word, he kept the peace, and it lasted long enough to give the United
States the breathing space they so much needed at the beginning of
their history.

The greatest perils in our foreign relations came, as it happened,
from another quarter, where peace seemed most secure, and where no man
looked for trouble. The government of the United States and the French
revolution began almost together, and it is one of the strangest facts
of history that the nation which helped so powerfully to give freedom
to America brought the results of that freedom into the gravest peril
by its own struggle for liberty. When the great movement in France
began, it was hailed in this country with general applause, and with a
sympathy as hearty as it was genuine, for every one felt that France
was now to gain all the blessings of free government with which
America was familiar. Our glorious example, it was clear, was destined
to change the world, and monarchies and despotisms were to disappear.
There was to be a new political birth for all the nations, and the
reign of peace and good-will was to come at once upon the earth at
the hands of liberated peoples freely governing themselves. It was a
natural delusion, and a kindly one. History, in the modern sense, was
still unwritten, and men did not then understand that the force and
character of a revolution are determined by the duration and intensity
of the tyranny and misgovernment which have preceded and caused it.
The vast benefit destined to flow from the French revolution was to
come many years after all those who saw it begin were in their graves,
but at the moment it was expected to arrive immediately, and in a form
widely different from that which, in the slow process of time, it
ultimately assumed. Moreover, Americans did not realize that the
well-ordered liberty of the English-speaking race was something
unknown and inconceivable to the French.

There were a few Americans who were never deceived for a moment, even
by their hopes. Hamilton, who "divined Europe," as Talleyrand sai