cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion."

Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L'Embuscade's prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of the correspondence, and a request for Genet's recall. Meanwhile the whole country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot in Philadelphia; and even the

sacred character of Washington was assailed prose and verse.

in

The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He died in the year 1834.

The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.

When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson, and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability, discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a blaze of glory.

IX

THE TWO PARTIES

WHEN Jefferson at last found himself at Monticello, having resigned his office as Secretary of State, he declared and believed that he had done with politics forever. To various correspondents he wrote as follows: "I think that I shall never take another newspaper of any sort. I find my mind totally absorbed in my rural occupations.

No circumtances, my dear sir, will ever more tempt me to engage in anything public. . . . I would not give up my retirement for the empire of the universe."

When Madison wrote in 1795, soliciting him to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency, Mr. Jefferson replied: "The little spice of ambition which I had in my younger days has long since evaporated, and I set still less store by a posthumous than present fame. The question

is forever closed with me." Nevertheless, within a few months Mr. Jefferson accepted the nomination, chiefly, it is probable, because, with his usual sagacity, he foresaw that the Republican candidate would be defeated as President, but elected as Vice-President. It must be remembered that at that time the candidate receiving the next to the highest number of electoral votes was declared to be Vice-President; so that there was always a probability that the presidential candidate of the party defeated would be chosen to the second office.

There were several reasons why Jefferson would have been glad to receive the office of Vice-President. It involved no disagreeable responsibility; it called for no great expenditure of money in the way of entertainments; it carried a good salary; it required only a few months' residence at Washington. "Mr. Jefferson often told me," remarks Mr. Bacon, "that the office of Vice-President was far preferable to that of President."

Mr. Jefferson therefore became the Republican nominee for President, and, as he doubt

less expected, was elected Vice-President, the vote standing as follows: Adams, 71; Jefferson, 68; Pinckney, 59; Burr, 30.

It is significant of Mr. Jefferson's high standing in the country that many people believed that he would not deign to accept the office of Vice-President; and Madison wrote advising him to come to Washington on the 4th of March, and take the oath of office, in order that this belief might be dispelled. Jefferson accordingly did so, bringing with him the bones of a mastodon, lately discovered, and a little manuscript book written in his law-student days, marked “ Parliamentary Pocket-Book." This was the basis of that careful and elaborate "Manual of Parliamentary Practice" which Jefferson left as his legacy to the Senate.

Upon receiving news of the election Jefferson had written to Madison : "If Mr. Adams can be induced to administer the government on its true principles, and to relinquish his bias to an English Constitution, it is to be considered whether it would not be, on the whole, for the public good to come to