Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/392

382 stumbled as he best could through this mortifying confession.


 * "We could not foresee," he said, "that the Governments of those Powers would not regard the distress and sufferings of their own people; that France would suffer her West Indian colonies to be almost desolated with famine, and to be compelled to apply to their inveterate enemy to save them from actual starvation rather than revoke her decrees; nor could we know that the Government of Great Britain would be regardless of the complaints and representations of her manufacturers and a respectable portion of her merchants; that it would lend a deaf ear to the hungry cries of the starving mechanics, and silence their just and loud complaints with the thunder of their murdering guns, and quench their hunger with a shower of balls instead of bread. We cannot be culpable for not anticipating such events."

Yet for twenty years the Federalists had wearied the country with prophecies of these disappointments which Campbell and his Republican friends said they could not be expected to foresee. Jefferson had persisted in acting on the theory that he could enforce national rights by peaceable means; had staked his reputation, after long and varied experience, on the soundness of this doctrine which his political opponents denied; and suddenly, on its failure, his followers pleaded that they could not be held culpable for failing to anticipate what their political opponents had steadily foretold. The confession of such an