The same end might have been reached if John
Adams had been sent as Minister to France and Thomas Jefferson to
England. But Britain being the token of centralisation, the general
tendency of the United States toward unionism seemed to Jefferson to
be the certain road to monarchism. This he conceived to be the ultimate
aim of Hamilton, born in the British West Indies, and Adams, who had
returned from Britain with his obnoxious theory that the "well-born"
ought to rule the remainder of the people.
The attempt of France, on the contrary, to secure the rights of man,
with which Jefferson had grown familiar during his residence in that
country, appealed to him both from a national and a personal standpoint.
"I still hope," he said in one of those periods of French excess which
bade fair to ruin the whole, "that the French Revolution will issue
happily. I feel that the permanence of our own leans in some degree
on that, and that a failure there would be a powerful argument to prove
that there must be a failure here." "A struggle for liberty is in
itself respectable and glorious," said Hamilton, in giving a Cabinet
opinion that the treaty made with France in 1778 had been annulled by
the abrogation of the monarchy and the execution of Louis XVI.
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