it study this dreadful monument of their friendship. Here every man may see how much weight treaties, alliances, benefactions, rights of neutrality, and even submission itself, retain in the scales of that Directory, who hunt justice from the earth, and whose sanguinary rapacity seeks plunder and spreads ruin alike on the Nile as on the Rhine, in Republican Congresses as well as in the heart of Monarchies.” Like _The Cannibals’ Progress_, this work was much quoted in the newspapers and caught the sympathetic eye of many clergyman, Jedediah Morse among the number. July 29, 1799, Chauncey Goodrich, of Hartford, Connecticut, wrote Oliver Wolcott to the effect that “the facts ... in Du Pan, Robinson, Barruel, have got into every farm house; they wont go out, till the stories of the indian tomahawk & war dances around their prisoners do.” (_Wolcott Papers_, vol. v, 77.) Nathaniel Ames did not think highly of the veracity of _The Cannibals’ Progress_, yet he paid tribute to its influence in the following fashion: “July 31, 1798. Judge Metcalf with his cockade on came down to see Gen. Washington expecting to get a Commission to fight the French & infatuated at the slanders of the Progress of the Cannibals that the French skin Americans, to make boots for their Army, &c.” (_Dedham Historical Register_, vol. ix: Diary of Ames, p. 24.) [280] Channing, _History of the United States_, vol. iv, pp. 176 _et seq._, gives a brief but entertaining account of the political jockeying on the part of our government which lay back of Monroe’s recall and the despatch of Pinckney to France. [281] Gibbs, _Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams_, vol. ii, pp. 15 _et seq._ _Cf._ McMaster, _History of the People of the United States_, vol. ii, pp. 368 _et seq._ [282] _Cf._ _Works of Fisher Ames_, vol. i, p. 225, letter of Ames to H. G. Otis. Ames’ comment on the discomfiture of the Democrats was characteristically vigorous: “The late communications [_i. e._, the X. Y. Z. despatches] have only smothered their rage; it is now a coal-pit, lately it was an open fire. Thacher would say, the effect of the despatches is only like a sermon in hell to awaken conscience in those whose day of probation is over, to sharpen pangs which cannot be soothed by hope.” [283] _The Writings of Thomas Jefferson_, vol. vii, p. 228, Jefferson’s letter to Edmund Pendleton. [284] The elation of Jedediah Morse over the turn affairs seemed to be taking was great. Under date of May 21, 1798, he wrote Wolcott, dilating on “the wonderful and happy change in the public mind. Opposition is shrinking into its proper insignificance, stripped of the support of its deluded _honest_ friends. I now feel it is an honour to be an American.” (_Wolcott Papers_, vol. viii, 23.)