icate questions. Washington wrote to
Randolph: "First, is or is not that resolution intended to be the
final act of the Senate; or do they expect that the new article which
is proposed shall be submitted to them before the treaty takes effect?
Secondly, does or does not the Constitution permit the President to
ratify the treaty, without submitting the new article, after it shall
be agreed to by the British King, to the Senate for their further
advice and consent?"

These questions were carefully considered, and Washington had made
up his mind to ratify conditionally on the modification of the West
Indian article, when news arrived which caused him to suspend action.
England, having made the treaty, and before any news could have been
received of our attitude in regard to it, took steps to render its
ratification both difficult and offensive, if not impossible. The mode
adopted was to renew the "provision order," as it was called, which
directed the seizure of all vessels carrying food products to France,
and thus give to the Jay treaty the interpretation it was designed to
avoid, that provisions could be declared contraband at the pleasure of
one of the belligerents. It was a stupid thing to do, for if England
desired to have peace with us, as her making the treaty indicated,
she should not have renewed the most irritating of all her past
performances before we had had opportunity even to sign and ratify.
Washington, on hearing of this move, withheld his signature, bade
Randolph prepare a strong memorial against the provision order, and
then betook himself to Mount Vernon on some urgent private business.

Before he started, however, the storm of popular rage had begun to
break. Bache had the substance of the treaty in the "Aurora" on June
29, and Mr. Stevens Thomson Mason, senator from Virginia, was so
pained by some slight inaccuracies in this version that he wrote Mr.
Bache a note, and sent him a copy of the treaty despite the injunction
of secrecy by which he as a senator was bound. Mr. Mason gained great
present glory by this frank breach of promise, and curiously enough
this single discreditable act is the only thing that keeps his name
and memory alive in history. All that he achieved at the moment was to
hurry the inevitable disclosure of the contents of a treaty which no
one desired to conceal, except in deference to official form. Mason's
note and copy of the treaty, made up into a pamphlet, were issued
from