resist it,
they put France under the necessity of doing the same thing. The supreme
of all laws, in all cases, is that of self-preservation.

As the commerce of neutral nations would thus be protected by the means
that commerce naturally contains within itself, all the naval operations
of France and England would be confined within the circle of acting
against each other: and in that case it needs no spirit of prophecy to
discover that France must finally prevail. The sooner this be done, the
better will it be for both nations, and for all the world.

Thomas Paine.(1)

1 Paine had already prepared his "Maritime Compact," and
devised the Rainbow Flag, which was to protect commerce, the
substance and history of which constitutes his Seventh
Letter to the People of the United States, Chapter XXXIII.
of the present volume. He sent the articles of his proposed
international Association to the Minister of Foreign
Relations, Talleyrand, who responded with a cordial letter.
The articles of "Maritime Compact," translated into French
by Nicolas Bouneville, were, in 1800, sent to all the
Ministers of Foreign Affairs in Europe, and to the
ambassadors in Paris.--_Editor._,

XXX. THE RECALL OF MONROE. (1)

1 Monroe, like Edmund Randolph and Thomas Paine, was
sacrificed to the new commercial alliance with Great
Britain. The Cabinet of Washington were entirely hostile to
France, and in their determination to replace Monroe were
assisted by Gouverneur Morris, still in Europe, who wrote to
President Washington calumnies against that Minister. In a
letter of December 19, 1795, Morris tells Washington that he
had heard from a trusted informant that Monroe had said to
several Frenchmen that "he had no doubt but that, if they
would do what was proper here, he and his friends would turn
out Washington." On July 2, 1796, the Cabinet ministers,
Pickering, Wolcott, and Mo-Henry, wrote to the President
their joint opinion that the interests of the United States
required Monroe's recall, and slanderously connected him
with anonymous letters from France written by M.
Montflorence. The recall, dated August 22, 1796, reached
Monroe early in November. It alluded to certain "concurring
circumstances," which induced his removal, and these "hidden
causes" (in Paine's phrase) Monroe vainly de