About a month after the second inauguration of Washington, in 1793, that lively little Frenchman, Edmond Charles Genet, somewhat excited by the revolutionary dance about the scaffold of Louis XVI., and the rather wild scenes around the revolutionary tribunal in Paris, capered over on a visit to the people of this country, and landed at Charleston, South Carolina. Although commissioned by the French Convention, now the subject of its bloody master Robespierre, as a Minister to our government, Monsieur Genet took upon his arrival a sudden fancy to aquatic sports, and despatched on his own hook several cruisers to fish in the troubled waters of the Atlantic for any English, Spanish, or Dutch flying-fish that could be caught. The old American Squire did not at all relish this international fishing-party, which proposed to use American lines, hooks, sinkers, and bait for the benefit of French packers. Kindly but firmly he requested M. Genet’s forwarders to order him back again. There have always been Americans, born with magnifying spectacles fastened firmly on their noses, by which every form of freedom, individual or national, spelt out to them a clear license to help any party, fraction, or entirety of a people fighting, or claiming to fight, against the old governing power. “Wherever you see a crown, hit it,” is their one motto. In April, 1793, this class had many representatives, who thought that the French gentleman and his fishing-parties were all right. In 1794 a Whiskey Rebellion arose, not in Kentucky nor among the Bourbonites, but in Pennsylvania. This insurrection defied for some time the cautionary, expostulating, and well-sealed proclamations of the President; but when the sharp military drum-beat, backed by fifteen thousand militia, with well-set bayonets, was heard in the western part of the State, its leaders and their weak followers reeled back into quiet and submission. Nothing so much shows the simplicity of that golden age of the Republic as this resistance to a whiskey tax. In our more debased but keener times, people distil much comfort from a heavy tax—far heavier than that of 1794—through taps and tubes placed in the obnoxious article, which is led off and around so circuitously and ingeniously as hardly to know where it is going, until all of a sudden it falls plump in large coin within the well-adjusted pockets of the non-complaining manufacturer. Instead of getting up insurrections in Pennsylvania against the high excise, he now forms combinations at Washington to raise it higher. [Illustration: THE WHISKEY REBELLION IN 1794. (p. 338) ]