“The experiment [of free commerce] about to be made will probably open too late the eyes of the people to the expediency and efficacy of the means [the embargo] which they have suffered to be taken out of the hands of the Government and to be incapacitated for future use.”[155] This condolence with Jefferson over the fate of their experiment showed the direction toward which Madison’s eyes were still turned; but, though a firm believer in his own theory of peaceable coercion, he was ready and had always been ready to accept and carry out any stronger scheme that Congress might prefer. He had no definite plan of his own; he clung to the idea that England and France could be brought by patience to respect neutral claims of right; but he felt that the actual submission made by Congress was apparent rather than real, and might be followed within a year by renewed resistance. Meanwhile nothing could be more dangerous to the Americans than the loss of self-respect. The habit of denouncing themselves as cowards and of hearing themselves denounced as a race that cared only for money tended to produce the qualities imputed. Americans of 1810 were persuaded that they could not meet Englishmen or Frenchmen on equal terms, man against man, or stand in battle against the veterans of Napoleon or Nelson. The sense of national and personal inferiority sank astonishingly deep. Reasonable enough as regarded the immense superiority of Europe in organization, it passed bounds when it condemned everything American as contemptible, or when the Federalist gentry refused to admit the Democrats of Pennsylvania or the Republicans of Virginia or the Government at Washington into the circle of civilized life. Social self-abasement never went so far as in its efforts to prove to Francis James Jackson, the British minister, that he was right in treating the national government with contempt. Englishman as Jackson was, and ready to assume without question every claim of superiority that might be made for his country or his class, he was surprised at the force of American allegiance to himself. As he travelled northward, after his dismissal from Washington, his private letters gave a strange idea of the chaos in American society. He wrote from Philadelphia,--