nd all who had any grievance against the
administration, from frontiersmen whose cabins had not been protected
against Indians or who had been forced to pay a whisky tax, to seamen
whose ships had not been protected by the Jay treaty. In short, all in
whom still persisted the deep-rooted colonial traditions of opposition
to strong government and dislike of any but local authorities were
{170} summoned to oppose an administration on the familiar ground that
it was working against their liberties by corruption, usurpation,
financial burdens, and gross partisanship for England and against
France.

On the other side, the Federalists were rapidly acquiring a state of
mind substantially Tory in character. They were coming to dread and
detest "democracy" as dangerous to the family and to society as well as
to government, and to identify it with the guillotine and the
blasphemies of the Worship of Reason. In the furious attacks which,
after the fashion of the day, the opposition papers hurled against
every act of the Federalist leaders, and which aimed as much to defile
their characters as to discredit their policies, they saw a pit of
anarchy yawning. Between parties so constituted, no alternative
remained but a fight to a finish; and, from the moment the Federalists
became genuinely anti-democratic, they were doomed. Only accident or
conspicuous success on the part of their leaders could delay their
destruction. A single false step on their part meant ruin.

With the ratification of the Jay treaty, a long period of peaceful
relations began between England and the United States. The American
shipowners quickly adapted themselves to the situation, and were soon
{171} prosperously occupied in neutral commerce. In England, American
affairs dropped wholly out of public notice during the exciting and
anxious years of the war of the second coalition. The Pitt Ministry
ended, leaving the country under the grip of a rigid repression of all
liberal thought or utterance, and was followed by the commonplace
Toryism of Addington and his colleagues. Then came the Treaty of
Amiens with France, the year of peace, the renewed war in 1803, and,
after an interval of confused parliamentary wranglings, the return to
power of Pitt in 1804, called by the voice of the nation to meet the
crisis of the threatened French invasion. The United States was
forgotten, diplomatic relations sank to mere routine. Such were the
unquestionable bene