HIS LIFE AND WORK 



York every sailboat or canoe had to give 

 bail to the federal government before it dared 

 to leave the dock. 



Whatever flimsy little structure of industry 

 had been built up in thirty years of independence, 

 was thrown prostrate by this Embargo. A 

 hundred thousand men stood on the streets with 

 helpless hands, begging for work or bread. 

 The jails were jammed with debtors, 1,300 

 in New York alone. The newspapers were 

 overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee- 

 houses were empty. The ships lay mouldering 

 at the docks. In those hand-to-mouth days 

 there was no piled-up reserve of food or wealth, 

 no range of towering wheat-banks at every 

 port; and the seaboard cities lay for a time as 

 desolate as though they had been ravaged by 

 a pestilence. 



In that darkest year the hardscrabble little 

 republic learned and remembered one of its 

 most important lessons, the fact that liberty 

 and independence are not enough. Here it 

 was, an absolutely free nation, the only free 

 civilized country in the world, and yet as mis- 



[9] 



