friend of Washington and of Hamilton, he inherited the American
traditions which found their consummation in the independence of the
United States and the establishment of the Federal Constitution. The
American patriots of the eighteenth century, like the leaders in Eng-
land's "glorious revolution" of the century before, considered their
measures to be essentially conservative; conservative, not in the re-
actionary sense, but in the sense of preserving rights and liberties which
they were accustomed to regard as their birthright. Having achieved
this end, they naturally desired an opportunity to work out their own
destiny in their own way; and of such an opportunity they conceived
the first condition to be the avoidance of commitments that would make
them subservient to the interests and adventures of other powers. On
this fundamental principle, which was formulated by Washington and
by Jefferson in similar terms, statesmen of all shades of opinion on
domestic questions were in accord. When, therefore, the wars growing
out of the French Revolution began, Washington, with Jefferson as his
Secretary of State, issued a proclamation of neutrality, while Hamilton,
as Secretary of the Treasury, took part in the formulation of measures
to carry it out. When, shortly afterwards, Genet, the new French min-
ister, arrived with instructions to bring about "a mutual understanding
to defend the empire of liberty wherever it can be embraced," the se-
date administration of the day, callous to the prospect of making the
world "safe for democracy" by blood and iron, turned a deaf ear to all
unneutral suggestions and modestly adhered to the rational course set
forth in its proclamation.

It was in the days of this earlier and sober tradition, and at a critical
juncture in his country's history, that Hamilton Fish, in assuming the
office of Secretary of State, took over the conduct of foreign affairs.
The great civil war, the far reaching effects of which time continues to
unfold, had come to its nominal close less than five years before. The
ship of state, straining at its chains and uncertain of its moorings,
tossed restlessly in troubled waters. At home the efforts of the victors,
according to the then current phrase, "to preserve the results of the
war," were raising new issues that were destined to be long and bitterly
contested. Abroad there were at least two major possibilities of strife.
Of these the more ramifying, though less imminent, was the state of the
relations between the United States and Great Britain. The other was
more apparent to the public eye. In the autumn of 1868 coincident rev-

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