Federal
leaders, and a warm supporter of the Constitution as it stood.]

CHAPTER III

UNITED STATES SENATE

The death of the grandfather of Mr. Gallatin, and soon after of his
aunt, strongly tempted him to make a journey to Geneva in the summer of
1793. The political condition of Europe at that time was of thrilling
interest. On January 21 the head of Louis XVI. fell under the
guillotine, to which Marie Antoinette soon followed him. The armies of
the coalition were closing in upon France. Of the political necessity
for these state executions there has always been and will always be
different judgments. That of Mr. Gallatin is of peculiar value. It is
found expressed in intimate frankness in a letter to his friend
Badollet, written at Philadelphia, February 1, 1794.

"France at present offers a spectacle unheard of at any other
period. Enthusiasm there produces an energy equally terrible and
sublime. All those virtues which depend upon social or family
affections, all those amiable weaknesses, which our natural
feelings teach us to love or respect, have disappeared before the
stronger, the only, at present, powerful passion, the _Amor
Patriae_. I must confess my soul is not enough steeled, not
sometimes to shrink at the dreadful executions which have restored
at least apparent internal tranquillity to that republic. Yet upon
the whole, as long as the combined despots press upon every
frontier, and employ every engine to destroy and distress the
interior parts, I think they, and they alone, are answerable for
every act of severity or injustice, for every excess, nay for every
crime, which either of the contending parties in France may have
committed."

Within a few years the publication of the correspondence of De Fersen,
the agent of the king and queen, has supplied the proof of the charge
that they were in secret correspondence with the allied sovereigns to
introduce foreign troops upon the soil of France,--a crime which no
people has ever condoned.

The French Revolution, which from its beginning in 1789 reacted upon the
United States with fully the force that the American Revolution exerted
upon France, had become an important factor in American politics. The
intemperance of Genet, the minister of the French Convention to the
United States on the one hand, and the breaches of neutrality by England
on the other, were dividing the