ing for anything more
than independence of foreign rule. Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow,
graduates of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach
them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural
rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore
them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the
mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were
as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these
beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been
speaking _de la prose_ all his life. They assumed the title of Citizen,
invented that of Citess to please strong-minded sisters, and became as
crazy as Monsieur Jourdain when invested with the dignity of Mamamouchi.
They proclaimed that the government of the United States, like all other
governments, was naturally hostile to the rights of the people; France
was their only hope; if the leagued despotisms succeeded against her,
they would soon send their engines of destruction among them. They
planted trees of liberty, and danced about them, and sang the Carmagnole
with variations from Yankee Doodle; they offered their lives for
liberty, which was in no danger, not even from their follies; and swore
destruction to tyrants, as if that unpopular class of persons existed in
the United States. They were the people,--the wise, the pure,--who could
do no wrong. The Federalists were aristocrats, monocrats,--lovers of
court ceremonies and levees, chariots and servants and plate. The
distinguished chief of the French party, whose "heart was a perpetual
bleeding fountain of philanthropy," was not above pretending to believe
that his opponents were striving to "establish the hell of monarchy" in
this republican paradise, and were "ready to surrender the commerce of
the country, and almost every privilege as a free, sovereign, and
independent nation, to the British." Even such a man as Samuel Adams, at
a dinner on board of a French frigate, could put the _bonnet rouge_ on
his venerable head, and pray that "France alone might rule the seas."

The New-Englanders laughed at the charge of monarchical predilections,
so absurdly inconsistent with their history, their laws, habits, and
feelings. Before the war, leading men in other Colonies had affected to
dread their levelling propensities; and General Charles Lee had said of
them, with some truth, that they were the only Americans w