thoughts were again, soon after, attracted to the author, by a
third series of essays, published in November, 1793, in the _Columbian
Centinel_, under the signature of Columbus, in which he entered the
lists in defence of the constituted authorities of the United States,
exposing and reprobating the language and conduct of Genet, the minister
from the French republic, whose repeated insults upon the first
magistrate of the American Union, and upon the national government, had
been as public and as shameless as they had been unprecedented. For,
after Washington, supported by the highest judicial authority of the
country, had, as President of the United States, denied publicly Genet's
authority to establish consular courts within them, and to issue letters
of marque and reprisal to their citizens, against the enemies of France,
he had the insolence to appeal from the President, and to deny his power
to revoke the exequatur of a French consul, who, by a process issued
from his own court, rescued, with an armed force, a vessel out of the
custody of justice.

In these essays Genet is denounced as a dangerous enemy; his appeal "as
an insolent outrage to _the man_ who was deservedly the object of the
grateful affection of the whole people of America;" "as a rude attempt
of a beardless foreign stripling, whose commission from a friendly power
was his only title to respect, not supported by a shadow of right on his
part, and not less hostile to the constitution than to the government."

The violence of the times, and the existence of a powerful party in the
United States ready to support the French minister in his hostility to
the national government, are also illustrated by the following facts:
"That an American jury had been compelled by the clamor of a collected
multitude to acquit a prisoner without the unanimity required by law;"
"by the circulation of caricatures representing President Washington and
a judge of the Supreme Court with a guillotine suspended over their
heads;" "by posting upon the mast of a French vessel of war, in the
harbor of Boston, the names of twenty citizens, all of them inoffensive,
and some of them personally respectable, as objects of detestation to
the crew;" "by the threatening, by an anonymous assassin, to visit with
inevitable death a member of the Legislature of New York, for
expressing, with the freedom of an American citizen, his opinion of the
proceedings of the French minister;" and "by t