They were at once received, and all danger of war with France was at an end.

This bold stroke separated the President permanently from at least half of his own party, since the Federalists did not wish for peace with France. His course would have given him a corresponding increase of favor from the other side, but for the great mistake the Federalists had made in passing certain laws, called the "Alien" law and the "Sedition" law; the first of these giving the President power to order any dangerous alien out of the country, and the second making it a penal offence to write anything false, scandalous, or malicious against the President or Congress. It was held, most justly, that this last law was directly opposed to the Constitution, which had been so amended as to guarantee freedom to the press. Looked at from this distance, it seems to have been one of those measures which inevitably destroy a party; and the Federalists certainly committed suicide when they passed it. It is clear that if it had stood, their own ablest newspapers four years after-Dennie's Portfolio, for instance-might have seen their proprietors imprisoned. These laws led to action almost equally extreme on the other side; the Republicans, powerless in Congress, fell back on their State Legislatures, and Kentucky and Virginia passed resolutions-drafted respectively by Jefferson and Madison-which went so near secession as to be quoted on that side at a later day. Kentucky distinctly resolved, in 1799, that any State might rightfully nullify any act of Congress which it regarded as unconstitutional.

Thus the bitterness grew worse and worse, till Adams dismissed from his cabinet the friends of Hamilton, calling them a "British faction." Hamilton, in turn, intrigued against Adams, and in 1800 the vote of South Carolina turned the scale in favor of the Republican electors. Jefferson and Burr, the two Republican nominees, had an equal number of votes -73; Adams having 65, Pinckney 64, and Jay 1. There was no

choice, and the decision then went to the House of Representatives, which took six days to make its election, during which time the Constitution underwent such a party strain as has only once been equalled since that period. It ended in the election of Thomas Jefferson as President, and of Aaron Burr as Vice-president, and on March 4, 1801, they were sworn into office.

On the very day of his inauguration Jefferson took a step towards what he called simplicity, and what his opponents thought vulgarity. We know through an English traveller, John Davis, that, instead of driving with a coach-and-six to be inaugurated, the new President rode on horseback to the Capitol, without even a servant, tied his horse to the fence, and walked in. It was partly accidental-he was, at any rate, negotiating for a four-horse equipage in Virginia—but it was a characteristic accident. In the same way, thenceforward, instead of going with a state procession, at the opening of each Congress, to read his Message in person, as had hitherto been the custom, he sent it in writing. He would have no especial levees nor invited guests, but was accessible to any one at any hour. He was so unwilling to have his birthday celebrated that he concealed it as much as possible. These ways were criticised as those of a demagogue. The President was reproached with a desire to conciliate the mob, or, as it was then sometimes called - as, for instance, in Mrs. Adams's lettersthe "mobility." His reason for sending a Message, according to that stout Federalist William Sullivan, was because a Speech could be answered, and a Message could not; although Sullivan asserts, in almost the next sentence, that Congress was utterly subservient to him, and it could therefore have made no difference. The discontinuance of formal levees is called by Sullivan "the abolition of all official dignity," and "descending to the lowest level."

Dennie's Portfolio, the best newspaper that had yet ap

peared in the United States, contained, August 18, 1804, among eulogies of the poems of Burns, and burlesques upon the early lyrical effusions of Wordsworth, an imaginary diary, supposed to have been picked up near the White House in the previous February. In this the President was made to say: "Ordered my horse-never ride with a servant-looks proud-mob doesn't like it must gull the boobies. Adams wouldn't bend sowould rather lose his place-knew nothing of the world." In another place he describes himself as meeting a countryman who took him for a Virginia overseer, and who talked politics. The countryman asked him to name one man of real character in the Democratic party. The President, after some stammering, suggested Jefferson, on which the countryman burst into a broad laugh, and asked him to enumerate his virtues-would he begin with his religion, chastity, courage, or honesty?-on which the President indignantly rode away. "Had he been as little as Sammy H. Smith," he adds, "I think I should have struck him." Ever since Jefferson's career as Governor of Virginia, the charge of personal cowardice had been unreasonably familiar.

The fictitious diary also contains some indecorous references to a certain "black Sally," a real or imaginary personage of that day whose companionship was thought discreditable to the President; also to the undoubted personal slovenliness of the Chief Magistrate--a point in which he showed an almost studied antagonism to the scrupulous proprieties of Washington. When Mr. Merry, the newly appointed British ambassador, went in official costume to be presented to the President at an hour previously appointed, he found himself, by his own narrative, "introduced to a man as the President of the United States, not merely in an undress, but actually standing in slippers down at the heels, and both pantaloons, coat, and underclothes indicative of utter slovenliness and indifference to appearance, and in a state of negligence actually studied." The minister went