“With great earnestness, to assure his Majesty’s government that it should experience during his administration as cordial and sincere acts of friendship as had ever been received under that of his predecessors. I am aware,” said the President elect, “that I have been represented as hostile to Great Britain; but this has been done only for electioneering purposes, and I hope henceforward such language will be used no longer. I can appeal to all my past conduct that in everything in which I have been engaged relatively to England, I have always been guided by a liberal policy. I wish to be at the head of affairs no longer than while I am influenced by such sentiments of equal liberality toward all nations. There is nothing to which I have a greater repugnance than to establish distinctions in favor of one nation against another.” The day after his inauguration he returned to the subject:-- “There is nothing I have more, or I may say so much, at heart as to adjust happily all differences between us, and to cultivate the most cordial harmony and good understanding. The English government is too just, I am persuaded, to regard newspaper trash, and the assertions contained in them that I am a creature of France and an enemy of Great Britain. For _republican_ France I may have felt some interest; but that is long over; and there is assuredly nothing in the present government of that country which could naturally incline me to show the smallest undue partiality to it at the expense of Great Britain, or indeed of any other country.”[240] Thornton felt no great confidence in the new President’s protests, and thought it possible that Jefferson had “on this, as he seems to have done on many late public occasions, taxed his imagination to supply the deficiency of his feelings.” All Englishmen were attached to the Federalist and New England interest; they could not understand that Virginia should be a safer friend than Massachusetts. Yet in truth Jefferson never was more serious than when he made these professions. The Southern republicans had nothing to gain from a quarrel with England; they neither wished for Canada, nor aspired to create shipping or manufactures: their chief antagonist was not England, but Spain. The only Power which could seriously injure them was Great Britain; and the only injury they could inflict in return was by conquering Canada for the benefit of Northern influence, or by building up manufactures which they disliked, or by cutting off their own markets for tobacco and cotton. Nothing warranted a belief that men like Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin would ever seek a quarrel with England.