So far as it was in
the power of the President, this was something which should be heard
by all men, even at the risk of much reiteration. It was a fact not
understood at home and not recognized abroad, but Washington proposed
to insist upon it so far as in him lay, until it was both understood
and admitted.
Meantime the flames were ever spreading from Paris, consuming and
threatening to consume the heaped up rubbish of centuries, and also
burning up many other more valuable things, as is the way with great
fires when they get beyond control. Many persons were interested in
the things of worth now threatened with destruction, and many others
in the rubbish and the tyrannous abuses. It was clear that war of a
wide and far-reaching kind could not be long put off. In March, 1793,
Washington wrote: "All our late accounts from Europe hold up the
expectation of a general war in that quarter. For the sake of
humanity, I hope such an event will not take place. But if it should,
I trust that we shall have too just a sense of our own interest to
originate any cause that may involve us in it."
Even while he wrote, the general war that he anticipated, the war
between France and England, had come. The news reached him at Mount
Vernon, and in the letter to Jefferson announcing his immediate
departure for Philadelphia he said: "War having actually commenced
between France and Great Britain, it behooves the government of this
country to use every means in its power to prevent the citizens
thereof from embroiling us with either of those powers, by endeavoring
to maintain a strict neutrality.
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