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roe would be to shut the door to intelligence of the in- CHAPTER fidelity of public officers, especially of diplomatic agents

in foreign countries, far removed from the immediate ob- 1797. servation of their own government. Mere want of confidence, from whatever cause arising, furnished reason enough for recalling a minister. If he were found, on trial, to be deficient in judgment, skill, or diligence, or if circumstances inspired a reasonable doubt of his sincerity, he ought to be removed. While his official communications had a fair appearance, a diplomatic agent might hold intimate and improper correspondence on political subjects with men known to be hostile to the gov ernment he represented, and whose actions tended to its subversion. He might, from mistaken views, even go so far as to countenance and invite a conduct on the part of the nation to which he was accredited, derogatory to the dignity of his own country and injurious to its interests. But a removal from office did not necessarily imply actual misconduct; it might imply merely want of ability, or a change in the state of political affairs such as to render the substitution of another person proper. It might also happen, and such was Monroe's case, that a president just retiring from office might remove, in which case no member of the succeeding administration could undertake to assign the motives of the removal. "There is no disposition," the letter concluded, "to treat you or any other man with injustice; but the government can not, for the sake of indulging your sensibility, sacrifice a great national principle. I agree with you that the president, in using that pleasure with which the Constitution has invested him, is bound to exercise it with discretion; but I deny that he is bound on every occasion to explain and justify his conduct to the individual removed from office, which, besides other objections, would expose the

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CHAPTER executive to perpetual altercations and controversies with the officers removed." Along with this official letter, as 1797. conclusive as it was sarcastic, and which has settled forever the practice of the government, Pickering sent a note in his private capacity, offering to communicate in that same capacity, if Monroe desired it, the reasons which had induced him, when officially consulted by the late president, to advise Monroe's removal, and tendering also, on behalf of the other cabinet officers, a similar communication.

July 3.

Monroe could hardly have expected that any official communication would be made to him of the reasons of his removal, though the demand for it, and the idea which that demand implied, that he held his appointment independently of the executive, were sufficiently in ac cordance with the system on which he had acted throughout. The real object of his application was to get up some excuse for a publication on his part, without the authority or consent of the government, of the correspondence which had passed between himself, the French offi cials, and the Department of State. Considering the refusal of his demand as satisfying that object, he rejected with insult the very reasonable offer made by Pickering on behalf of himself and the other members of the cabinet. "I have yet to learn," he insolently wrote, "what your pretensions are to confidence as an individual citizen, or the weight which your opinion ought to have as such, especially in the present case;" and he proceeded to arraign the late administration, including Washington, the responsible head of it, as destitute of candor, and as seeking, by every possible artifice which interest or ingenuity could suggest, to disguise the real motives of their conduct, of which the present corre spondence was, in his opinion, a fresh proof. His letter

concluded by demanding to know whether Pickering, CHAPTER

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in stating in his official letter the reasons which might justify the recall of a minister, had intended to insinuate 1797. that he, Monroe, was the tool and partisan of another country against the honor and interest of his own.

As if to save the necessity of an answer to this question, which, considering the insolent tone of the whole letter, Pickering could hardly have given without compromitting his self-respect, Monroe proceeded to make an unauthorized, irregular, and, in the delicate state in which affairs then stood, a very impudent and unjustifiable publication of his entire diplomatic correspondence; thereby putting into a permanent form authentic and unquestionable proofs of his own folly, and of the superior wisdom and prudence of the government. It was the object of this publication, of the more material parts of which a pretty full abstract has already been given, to make manifest to the public, and especially to the FrenchAmerican party, that by repudiating the British treaty, and silently putting up with such breaches of the French treaty as the exigencies of the war might make convenient to that nation, the friendship of the Directory might have been and might still be preserved; and even their aid against England purchased by supplying their pecuniary necessities. That Monroe should have been willing to

urchase friendship and assistance at such a price; that ne should have been anxious to aid in reducing the United States to a degradation like that of Holland and Spain--a position of helpless dependence on France, did certainly expose him to the charge of having been "the tool and partisan of another country against the honor and interests of his own;" nor is it wonderful that many Federalists of that day should have sought to explain his excessive zeal in this matter by the supposition

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CHAPTER that, like other American residents in France, his politics had been influenced by pecuniary considerations. In 1797. fact, hints had been dropped-indeed, the charge had been openly made on the floor of Congress, and that by no less a person than Harper-that Monroe had been bribed; a circumstance which will serve to explain, and which ought also partially to excuse, the excessive acrimony of his letters to Pickering. These gross insinuations were totally baseless. The time had not yet come when American statesmen were to be purchased with money. How perfectly sincere Monroe was in his opinions is manifest throughout the whole correspondence, which no purchased tool of France-none but a man blinded by enthusiastic passion, could ever have written, and still less would have published. Nor were such views of the honor and interest of the United States, strange as they may seem at this day, at all confined to Monroe. They were shared, to a greater or less extent, by most of the leaders, and by the great mass of the opposition party, the result of two powerful co-operating passions, hatred of England and excessive admiration of the new French politics, too strong in many minds for sober judgment.

Hatred of England, which, during the progress of the Revolution, had struck so deep a root in the popular mind, had been aggravated during recent years not only by British insolence and aggression on the frontiers and the seas, but by that stern and suspicious domestic policy, the natural reaction against French excesses, by which, in Great Britain itself, all Republican tendencies and indications had been suppressed; a policy which, by driving those inclined to Republicanism into an exile more or less involuntary, had served to transfer to America, there to germinate in a fruitful soil, many roots of bitterness against the British government. Any breach

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with France would lead, it was feared, to an intimate CHAPTER union with Great Britain, whence new support to the monarchical and aristocratic tendencies charged upon the 1797. existing administration; a further infusion of British sentiments and institutions; and an indefinite postponement of those happy times in which Jefferson, "the friend of the people," placed at the head of the government, was to snatch it from the grasp of monarchists and aristocrats, and to restore it to its native republican simplicity. Intimacy with Great Britain, fraught with such consequences, was to be avoided, it was thought, at almost any hazard.

Nothing is so gratifying to the human mind as simplicity and instant completion. The idea of a short cut to liberty and equality by killing off kings and aristocrats was quite too fascinating to be easily abandoned. Though born and baptized amid horrible outrages; though, in spite of all its paper constitutions, consisting practically in nothing more or less than the seizure of absolute political authority by a few enthusiastic and au dacious individuals, exercised, indeed, in the name of the people, but constantly trampling, without scruple or hesitation, on those rights of man on which it professed to be founded; the old despotism, in new hands, bent like that on universal dominion, but inspired with tenfold energy and ferocity; in spite of this its real character, the French republic continued to be regarded by multitudes, both in America and elsewhere, as actually a free and democratic government erected on the ruins of an ancient tyranny, the commencement of a political millennium whence liberty, peace, and happiness were to flow forth on Europe and the world. The unscrupulous and mostly unprincipled politicians, whoever they might be, who controlled for the moment the course of French af