THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMER 167 



and increased comfort and happiness everywhere. It 

 is too easy to forget that the atrocities of the Reign of 

 Terror were the result of a temporary destruction of 

 confidence among the members of the community, 

 and that for this destruction of confidence the royalist 

 emigres, in seeking foreign military aid against their 

 own country, were chiefly to blame. There can be no 

 doubt that Jefferson, without approving the excesses 

 of the Jacobins, understood the purport of events in 

 France more correctly and estimated them more fairly 

 than most of his American contemporaries. Of course 

 this gave his political enemies a chance to call him a 

 Jacobin, and has led those people of our own time 

 to whom he is little more than a name to suppose 

 that he obtained his theory of the government from 

 Rousseau ! 



When Jefferson came home, in the autumn of 1789, 

 it was with the intention of soon returning to France 

 to watch the progress of events ; but when he arrived 

 at Monticello, two days before Christmas, he found 

 awaiting him an invitation from President Washing- 

 ton to the position of Secretary of State, and after some 

 hesitation, being strongly urged by Washington and 

 Madison, he accepted it. In March, 1 790, he took his 

 place in the cabinet; during the preceding year it 

 had been temporarily occupied by John Jay, whom 

 Washington was about to make chief justice. As the 

 most crying need of the new government was revenue, 

 the work of organization had been carried on mainly 

 by Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. 



It has often been said that Washington, in choosing 

 for the chief places in his cabinet two men so antago- 

 nistic to each other as Hamilton and Jefferson, was 



