Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. | Page 5

will rally a second time round the standard of Common Sense."
Notwithstanding the weight of Jefferson's character, and the strength of his recommendation, in June, 1791, young Adams entered the lists against Paine and his pamphlet, which was in truth an encomium on the National Assembly of France, and a commentary on the rights of man, inferring questionable deductions from unquestionable principles. In a series of essays, signed Publicola, published in the Columbian Centinel, he states and controverts successively the fundamental doctrines of Paine's work; denies that "whatever a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do," and maintains, in opposition, that "nations, no less than individuals, are subject to the eternal and immutable laws of justice and morality;" declaring that Paine's doctrine annihilated the security of every man for his inalienable rights, and would lead in practice to a hideous despotism, concealed under the parti-colored garments of democracy. The truth of the views in these essays was soon made manifest by the destruction of the French constitution, so lauded by Paine and Jefferson, the succeeding anarchy, the murder of the French monarch, and the establishment of a military despotism.
In April, 1793, Great Britain declared war against France, then in the most violent frenzy of her revolution. In this war, the feelings of the people of the United States were far from being neutral. The seeds of friendship for the one, and of enmity towards the other belligerent, which the Revolutionary War had plentifully scattered through the whole country, began everywhere to vegetate. Private cupidity openly advocated privateering upon the commerce of Great Britain, in aid of which commissions were issued under the authority of France. To counteract the apparent tendency of these popular passions, Mr. Adams published, also in the Centinel, a series of essays, signed Marcellus, exposing the lawlessness, injustice, and criminality, of such interference in favor of one of the belligerents. "For if," he wrote, "as the poet, with more than poetical truth, has said, 'war is murder,' the plunder of private property, the pillage of all the regular rewards of honest industry and laudable enterprise, upon the mere pretence of a national contest, in the eye of justice can appear in no other light than highway robbery. If, however, some apology for the practice is to be derived from the incontrollable law of necessity, or from the imperious law of war, certainly there can be no possible excuse for those who incur the guilt without being able to plead the palliation; for those who violate the rights of nations in order to obtain a license for rapine manifestly show that patriotism is but the cloak for such enterprises; that the true objects are plunder and pillage; and that to those engaged in them it was only the lash of the executioner which kept them in the observance of their civil and political duties."
After developing the folly and madness of such conduct in a nation whose commerce was expanded over the globe, and which was "destitute of even the defensive apparatus of war," and showing that it would lead to general bankruptcy, and endanger even the existence of the nation, he maintained that "impartial and unequivocal neutrality was the imperious duty of the United States." Their pretended obligation to take part in the war resulting from "the guarantee of the possessions of France in America," he denied, on the ground that either circumstances had wholly dissolved those obligations, or they were suspended and made impracticable by the acts of the French government.
The ability displayed in these essays attracted the attention of Washington and his cabinet, and the co?ncidence of these views with their own was immediately manifested by the proclamation of neutrality. Their 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