"France at present offers a spectacle unheard of at any other period. Enthusiasm there produces an energy equally terrible and sublime. All those virtues which depend upon social or family affections, all those amiable weaknesses, which our natural feelings teach us to love or respect, have disappeared before the stronger, the only, at present, powerful passion, the _Amor Patriae_. I must confess my soul is not enough steeled, not sometimes to shrink at the dreadful executions which have restored at least apparent internal tranquillity to that republic. Yet upon the whole, as long as the combined despots press upon every frontier, and employ every engine to destroy and distress the interior parts, I think they, and they alone, are answerable for every act of severity or injustice, for every excess, nay for every crime, which either of the contending parties in France may have committed." Within a few years the publication of the correspondence of De Fersen, the agent of the king and queen, has supplied the proof of the charge that they were in secret correspondence with the allied sovereigns to introduce foreign troops upon the soil of France,--a crime which no people has ever condoned. The French Revolution, which from its beginning in 1789 reacted upon the United States with fully the force that the American Revolution exerted upon France, had become an important factor in American politics. The intemperance of Genet, the minister of the French Convention to the United States on the one hand, and the breaches of neutrality by England on the other, were dividing the American people into English and French parties. The Federalists sympathized with the English, the late enemies, and the Republicans with the French, the late allies, of the United States. Mr. Gallatin had about made up his mind to visit Europe, when an unexpected political honor changed his plans. The Pennsylvania legislature elected him a senator of the United States on joint ballot, a distinction the more singular in that the legislature was Federalist and Mr. Gallatin was a representative of a Republican district, and strong in that faith. Moreover, he was not a candidate either of his own motion or by that of his friends, but, on the contrary, had doubts as to his eligibility because of insufficient residence. This objection, which he himself stated in caucus, was disregarded, and on February 28, 1793, by a vote of 45 to 37, he was chosen senator. Mr. Gallatin had just completed his thirty-second year, and now a happy marriage came opportunely to stimulate his ambition and smooth his path to other honors.