ed States were far from being neutral. The seeds of
friendship for the one, and of enmity towards the other belligerent,
which the Revolutionary War had plentifully scattered through the whole
country, began everywhere to vegetate. Private cupidity openly advocated
privateering upon the commerce of Great Britain, in aid of which
commissions were issued under the authority of France. To counteract the
apparent tendency of these popular passions, Mr. Adams published, also
in the _Centinel_, a series of essays, signed Marcellus, exposing the
lawlessness, injustice, and criminality, of such interference in favor
of one of the belligerents. "For if," he wrote, "as the poet, with more
than poetical truth, has said, 'war is murder,' the plunder of private
property, the pillage of all the regular rewards of honest industry and
laudable enterprise, upon the mere pretence of a national contest, in
the eye of justice can appear in no other light than highway robbery.
If, however, some apology for the practice is to be derived from the
incontrollable law of necessity, or from the imperious law of war,
certainly there can be no possible excuse for those who incur the guilt
without being able to plead the palliation; for those who violate the
rights of nations in order to obtain a license for rapine manifestly
show that patriotism is but the cloak for such enterprises; that the
true objects are plunder and pillage; and that to those engaged in them
it was only the lash of the executioner which kept them in the
observance of their civil and political duties."

After developing the folly and madness of such conduct in a nation whose
commerce was expanded over the globe, and which was "destitute of even
the defensive apparatus of war," and showing that it would lead to
general bankruptcy, and endanger even the existence of the nation, he
maintained that "impartial and unequivocal neutrality was the imperious
duty of the United States." Their pretended obligation to take part in
the war resulting from "the guarantee of the possessions of France in
America," he denied, on the ground that either circumstances had wholly
dissolved those obligations, or they were suspended and made
impracticable by the acts of the French government.

The ability displayed in these essays attracted the attention of
Washington and his cabinet, and the coincidence of these views with
their own was immediately manifested by the proclamation of neutrality.
Their