CHAPTER IV. THE STRUGGLE AND FALL OF FEDERALISM; OR, JOHN ADAMS’S ADMINISTRATION. 1797–1801. The Pre-Adamite Epoch: its Upheavals and Disruptions in America, and the red-hot diplomatic Stones, Fauchet and Adet, ejected from France upon us.—The new French Acrostics; and the Attempts by our Commissioners and Congress to solve them.—Gold-mounted Spectacles offered us by France; and our Inability to see our Interests or Duty through them.—Why and when the Keel of the American Navy was laid.—Of the Alien and Sedition Laws; why passed and how passed by.—General Washington and the Gallic Cock; a Crow never crowed out.—Napoleon’s Tour in Egypt and Palestine described; and its Results on the Treaty of Peace deduced.—Of the Office and Offices of Consul.—A Review and new View of our Difficulties with France from 1790 to 1800.—What a Pitt England fell into.—The City of Washington as a Geographical Study.—About Mississippi, Alabama, and the French Growth of Mobile.—The Territorial Condition illustrated.—The Introduction of Vaccine and other Virus.—Why some Things first break out in Boston.—State of Parties in 1801.—Why the first Adams was banished from the Presidential Eden; and the Flaming Swords which prevented his Return. The elder pre-Adamite epoch in our history was past. New, more fiery, and eruptive elements, anti-Federal or Republican, upheaving and disrupting the old strata below, broke the settled upper crust of our political world. In France, the Directory of Five, succeeding to the Convention, and its powerful national forces,—now welded to Napoleon by the fusing heats of Monte Notte, Arcoli, and Rivoli,—ejected out upon us those red-hot diplomatic stones, Fauchet and Adet. The French conundrums thickened. Genet’s successors out-geneted Genet. They not only equipped cruisers from American ports, but—displeased with a treaty which our government had seen fit to make with England, stipulating for the neutrality of America in the pending war between France on the one side, and England, Holland, Spain, and Rome on the other—authorized the capture and confiscation of American ships. In fact, the French envoys seemed determined to show the absurdity of the old-fashioned rule, that it took two to make a bargain. Mr. Pinckney, the American minister to France, was obliged to leave that American paradise, Paris, without a fig-leaf of excuse to cover the naked results of his mission.