a state of defence _possessions guarantied by the United States_, had the front to answer, with an ironical carelessness, that the principles established by the President did not permit him to lend so much as a pistol.”[162] In another letter, the French minister, under date of June 8, 1793, requires that “the Federal Government should observe the public engagements contracted, and give to the world the example of a true neutrality, which does not consist in the cowardly abandonment of friends at the moment when danger menaces.”[163] And in still another letter, dated June 22, 1793, he declares that “it is in the conventional compacts, collectively, that we ought to seek contracts of alliance and of commerce simultaneously made, if we wish to take their sense and interpret faithfully the intentions of the people who cemented them, and of the men of genius who dictated them.”[164] All of which was followed by another letter, dated November 14, 1793, in which the minister says categorically: “I beg you to lay before the President of the United States, as soon as possible, the decree and the inclosed note, and to obtain from him the earliest decision, _either as to the guaranty I have claimed the fulfilment of for our colonies_, or upon the mode of negotiation of the new treaty I was charged to propose to the United States, and which would make of the two nations but one family.”[165] At last Genet was recalled, but the question of our engagements with France could not be dismissed. It was more menacing than any minister. Without it all the turbulence of Genet would have been as the idle wind.