Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/127

1805. He played a game of finesse hardly safe in the face of men like Godoy, Talleyrand, and Napoleon, whose finesse was chiefly used to cover force, and was not betrayed or derided by factious opposition in the press. Besides being unsafe, it was unfair to himself. Jefferson was an honest man, and in putting on the outward appearance of a Talleyrand, he resembled an amateur imitating Talma and Garrick. Gestures and tones alike were unnatural, awkward, and false; they exposed him to ridicule. If President Jefferson had taken the public into his confidence, he would have told the people that under no circumstances would he consent to war; but that if the great Powers of Europe combined to injure America, she would close her ports, abandon her commerce, shut herself within her own continent, and let the world outside murder and rob elsewhere. Such an avowal implied no disgrace; the policy it proclaimed was the alternative to war; and as the radical doctrine of the Republican party, the course was not only that which Jefferson meant to take, but it was that which he took. The avowal might have invited aggression, and have been followed by failure; but he would have done better to fail on a direct issue of principle, than to fail after evading the issue until the issue itself was lost.

To carry out his scheme, the President put forward two policies,—a public and a secret; or, as he called it, an ostensible and a real one. The warlike recommendations of the Annual Message were the public