Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/408



Chapter 17: Jefferson's Enemies
objects the President and the Secretary of State may have expected to gain by their change of tone in the winter of 1803-1804 toward Spain and England, they must have been strangely free from human passions if they were unconscious of making at least two personal enemies upon whose ill-will they might count. If they were unaware of giving their victims cause for bitterness,—or if, as seemed more probable, they were indifferent to it,—the frequent chances of retaliation which the two ministers enjoyed soon showed that in diplomacy revenge was not only sweet but easy. Even the vehement Spanish hatred felt by Yrujo for Madison fell short of the patient Anglo-Saxon antipathy rooted in the minds of the British minister and his wife. When Yrujo, in March 1804, burst into the State Department with the Mobile Act in his hand and denounced Madison to his face as party to an "infamous libel" he succeeded in greatly annoying the secretary without violating Jefferson's "canons of etiquette." Under the code of republican manners which the President and his secretary had introduced, they could not fairly object to anything which Yrujo might choose to say