Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/12

6 Jefferson was thus the first Pan-American. That he was also first of all an American and that his pro-French sympathies counted as nothing when brought into conflict with this feeling for what humanity had at stake in America is strongly subscribed to by the French Minister Adet when, striving to secure the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1796, he reported to his government an estimate of Jefferson's character. He said: "I do not know whether, as I am told, we will always find in him a man entirely devoted to our interests. Mr. Jefferson likes us because he detests England; he seeks to unite with us because he suspects us less than Great Britain, but he would change his sentiments towards us to-morrow, perhaps, if to-morrow Great Britain ceased to inspire him with fear. Jefferson, although a friend of liberty and the sciences, although an admirer of the efforts we have made to break our chains and dissipate the clouds of ignorance which weigh upon mankind, Jefferson, I say, is an American, and, by that title it is impossible for him to be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of European peoples."

Jefferson's antipathy to European institutions was the result of experience and was fairly warranted, as the contrast between the political conditions in Europe and America at the opening of the nineteenth century was not greatly different from that between those in Russia and America at the opening of the twentieth century. How true Adet's surmise was and how utterly Jefferson's French leanings were to disappear when they clashed with his solicitude for the largest future of a greater America was demonstrated a few years later. The Jefferson that was the author of the idea of a transcontinental