Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/254

1801. mercy of any Power which might choose to rob it, and the President announced in advance that he relied for safety upon the soundness of his theory that every foreign country felt a vital interest in retaining American commerce and the use of American harbors. All this was true, and the experiment might be called revolutionary, considering the condition of the world; nevertheless there were shades of difference in the arguments on which it rested. Even Jefferson wavered in asserting the permanence of the system, while Gallatin avowedly looked forward to the time when diminished debt and increasing resources would allow wider scope of action. Viewed from this standpoint, the system was less rigid than it seemed, since a period of not more than five or six years was needed to obtain Gallatin's object.

By an unlucky chance the system never became fully established. The first step in foreign affairs taken by the new Administration plunged it into difficulties which soon forced Congress to reimpose taxation to the full amount of the internal taxes. Jefferson had not been three months in power before he found himself, by no fault of his own or of his predecessors, at war with a country against which he was forced to use in his own defence some of those frigates, the construction of which had been vehemently resisted by his party, and which he was anxious only to leave under the care of a score of marines at the Navy Yard in the Eastern Branch of the Potomac. From time immemorial the northern