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Sparks, Edwin Erle, 1860-1924

"The United States of America, Part 1"

By and by, the changes
of fortune in France began to send over Constitutionalists,
Thermidorians, Fructidorians, and the like, to plot and intrigue. "They
kept their eyes fixed on France," said a French volunteer, who had
returned to America to secure the pay due him since Revolutionary days,
"to which all expected to return sooner or later and recommence what
each called his _great work_, for there were exactly the same number
of political systems as there were refugees." The French sympathisers
in America mingled with these _emigres_ and were more or less concerned
with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of
their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British
United States Government," as they called it.
Added to these scribblers were certain other agitators, preachers, and
writers, refugees from England and Scotland, driven out by the British
Government in its effort to keep the sentiments of the French
propagandists from taking root in British soil. More libel suits had
been instituted in the courts of England during a single year of the
French Revolution than in any two previous decades.


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