Philadelphia was made the national capital for the rest of the century; and here, for the coming seven years, Washington’s weekly receptions on Tuesdays, and his dinner-parties on Thursdays, created a stir among the disciples of Penn, and caused much green-looking ink to be shed from cavilling pens all through the country. Like congregations which look with a keen-edged criticism upon the social movements of their clergymen, the people thus early began to peer into the green-room of the President’s mansion, to count the silver spoons, to feel of the window-curtains, and to compare their silken qualities favorably with their own hangings, and the qualities of the Presidential tenant, as thereby affected, unfavorably with their own. A democratic people prefer to occupy the green-room themselves. The honeymoon of our newly wedded constitutional government was not all roseate. Through the press a wonderful amount of good advice and double-tongued compliment as already given to the old gentleman, who was not likely to forget all the peccadillos he had, and to wonder why he had been restrained from the easy commission of others which he had not committed. The French Revolution had now begun its series of bloody conundrums; and, not content with posing its European circle of listeners with perplexing questions, crossed the Atlantic, and thrust upon the administration and demanded immediate answers to some very bothering acrostics and puzzles. The grand riddle which they prided themselves upon, and required to be first answered, might be stated in the rule-of-three form thus: If France, with a population of seventeen millions, assisted America to gain her independence from 1778 to 1783, what aid should America, with a population of 3,927,827, give, in 1790, to the Constituent Assembly, assuming to act for France, against the monarchical adherents of Louis XVI. and the turbulent guillotining mob, struggling up into fierce, resentful power under Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins? This riddle was differently guessed by the leading members of our government. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jay, now recognized as the leaders of a party for the first time called the Federal, put in the ready, safe, and wise answer, “None”; while Jefferson and Randolph, in the government, and Madison, Gallatin, and young Edward Livingston, out of it,—now the heads of the anti-Federal party,—spelled out from their general love of liberty and sympathy for those struggling against monarchical power, without regard to international rights or home duties, the response, “All that we can.”