5351. MONARCHY, Preference for.—
I
returned from the mission [to France] in the
first year of the new government * * * and
proceeded to New York to enter on the office
of Secretary of State. Here, certainly, I found
a state of things which, of all I had ever contemplated,
I the least expected. I had left
France in the first year of her Revolution, in
the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for reformation.
My conscientious devotion to these
rights could not be heightened, but it had been
aroused and excited by daily exercise. The
President received me cordially, and my colleagues
and the circle of principal citizens,
apparently, with welcome. The courtesies of
dinner parties given me, as a stranger newly
arrived among them, placed me at once in
their familiar society. But I cannot describe
the wonder and mortification with which the
table conversations filled me. Politics was the
chief topic, and a preference of kingly, over
republican, government was evidently the favorite
sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor
yet a hypocrite; and I found myself, for the
most part, the only advocate on the republican
side of the question, unless among the guests
there chanced to be some member of that party
from the Legislative Houses.—
The Anas. Washington ed. ix, 91.
Ford ed., i, 159.
(1818)
