I have already stated that, having
tolerated Genet's insults and menaces as far as he deemed necessary,
Washington put forth his hand and crushed the spluttering Frenchman
like a bubble.
Persons who like to trace the sardonic element in history--the element
which seems to laugh derisively at the ineffectual efforts of us poor
mortals to establish ourselves and lead rational lives in the world as
it is--can find few better examples of it than these early years of
the American Republic. In the war which brought about the independence
of the American Colonies, England had been their enemy and France
their friend. Now their instinctive gratitude to France induced many,
perhaps a majority of them, to look with effusive favor on France,
although her character and purpose had quite changed and it was very
evident that for the Americans to side with France would be against
sound policy and common sense. Neutrality, the strictest neutrality,
between England and France was therefore the only rational course; but
the American partisans of these rivals did their utmost to render this
unachievable. Much of Washington's second term see-sawed between one
horn and the other of this dilemma. The sardonic aspect becomes more
glaring if we remember that the United States were a new-born nation
which ought to have been devoting itself to establishing viable
relations among its own population and not to have been dissipating
its strength taking sides with neighbors who lived four thousand miles
away.
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