The wild French-Revolutionary rage that swept through the South now fanned the flame and made the sparks fly over into Canada. In April 1793 a fiery Red Republican, named Genet, landed at Charleston as French minister to the United States and made a triumphal progress to Philadelphia. Nobody bothered about the fundamental differences between the French and American revolutions. France and England were going to war and that was enough. Genet was one of those 'impossibles' whom revolutions throw into ridiculous power. When he began his campaign the Republican South was at his feet. Planters and legislators donned caps of liberty and danced themselves so crazy over the rights of abstract man that they had no enthusiasm left for such concrete instances as Loyalists, Englishmen, and their own plantation slaves. Then Genet made his next step in the new diplomacy by fitting out French privateers in American harbours and seizing British vessels in American waters. This brought Washington down on him at once. Then he lost his head completely, abused everybody, including Jefferson, and retired from public life as an American citizen, being afraid to go home. Genet's absurd career was short, but very meteoric while it lasted, and full of anti-British mischief-making. His agents were everywhere; and his successor, Adet, carried on the underground agitation with equal zeal and more astuteness. Vermont offered an excellent base of operations. Finding that its British proclivities had not produced the Chambly canal for its trade with the St Lawrence, it had become more violently anti-British than ever before and even proposed taking Canada single-handed. This time its new policy remained at fever heat for over three years and only cooled down when a British man-of-war captured the incongruously named _Olive Branch_, in which Ira Allen was trying to run the blockade from Ostend with twenty thousand muskets and other arms which he represented as being solely for the annual drill of the Vermont militia. Thus Carleton had to watch the raging South, the dangerous West, and bellicose Vermont, all together, besides taking whatever measures he could against the swarms of secret enemies within the gates. The American immigrants who wanted 'property not liberty' were ready enough for a change of flag whenever it suited them. But they were few compared with the mass of French Canadians who were being stirred into disaffection. The seigneurs, the clergy, and the very few enlightened people of other classes had no desire for being conquered by a regicide France or an obliterating American Republic. But many of the habitants and of the uneducated in the towns lent a willing ear to those who promised them all kinds of liberty and property put together.