ladelphia and summoned his advisers,
Hamilton presented twelve questions for discussion, the most pressing of
which were: Shall a proclamation issue for the purpose of preventing
interferences of the citizens of the United States in the war between
France and Great Britain, etc.? Shall it contain a declaration of
neutrality? Shall a minister from this Republic of France be received?
Jefferson was in a far less enviable position than Hamilton. He neither
wished for war, nor dared he machinate for it; but with all his
democratic soul he loved the cause which was convulsing the world from
its ferocious centre in France. Had Jefferson come of stout yeoman
stock, like John Adams, or of a long line of patrician ancestors, like
Hamilton, and, to a lesser degree, like Washington, he might, judging
from certain of his tastes, and his love of power, have become, or been,
as aristocratic in habit and spirit as were most men of his wealth,
position, and importance in the young country. But the two extremes met
in his blood. The plebeianism of his father showed itself in the
ungainly shell, in the indifference to personal cleanliness, and in the
mongrel spirit which drove him to acts of physical cowardice for which
his apologists blush. But his mother had belonged to the aristocracy of
Virginia, and this knowledge induced a sullen resentment that he should
be so unlike her kind, so different in appearance from the courtly men
of his State. Little was wanting to accelerate his natural desire to
level his country to a plane upon which with his gifts he easily could
loom as a being of superior mould; but when a British sovereign publicly
turned his back upon him, and the English court, delighted with its cue,
treated him with an unbearable insolence, nothing more was needed to
start the torrent of his hate against all who stood for aristocracy.
Democracy rampant on all sides of him, during his sojourn in France,
found in him not only an ardent sympathizer, but a passionate advocate.
He quite overlooked the fact that he failed to persuade the country of
his enthusiasm to accord the United States fair commercial treatment: it
embodied and demonstrated his ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity,
and he was its most devoted friend, unresting until he had insinuated
his own admiration into the minds of his followers in America, and made
Jacobinism a party issue.

To turn his back upon France, therefore, to help her neither in money
nor mora