For a considerable length of time, no certain intelligence reached the United States respecting the negotiation at Paris. At length, in the winter of 1798, letters were received from the American envoys, indicating an unfavourable state of things; and, in the spring, despatches arrived which announced the total failure of the mission. History will scarcely furnish the example of a nation, not absolutely degraded, which has received from a foreign power such open contumely, and undisguised insult, as were, on this occasion, suffered by the United States in the persons of their ministers. [Sidenote: Their treatment.] It was insinuated that their being taken from the party[53] which had supported the measures of their own government furnished just cause of umbrage; and, under slight pretexts, the executive directory delayed to accredit them as the representatives of an independent nation. In this situation, they were assailed by persons, not indeed invested with formal authority, but exhibiting sufficient evidence of the source from which their powers were derived, who, in direct and explicit terms, demanded money from the United States as the condition which must precede, not only the reconciliation of America to France, but any negotiation on the differences between the two countries. [Footnote 53: Two of them were of the party denominated federal; the third was arranged with the opposition.] That an advance of money by a neutral to a belligerent power would be an obvious departure from neutrality, though an insuperable objection to this demand, did not constitute the most operative reason for repelling it. Such were the circumstances under which it was made, that it could not be acceded to without a surrender of the real independence of the United States; nor without being, in fact, the commencement of a system, the end of which it was impossible to foresee. [Illustration: Mount Vernon _This colonial mansion overlooking the Potomac River fifteen miles south of Washington, D.C., and famous as the home and burial-place of the "Father of His Country," was built in 1743 by Washington's elder brother, Lawrence, who called it Mount Vernon, after Admiral Vernon, under whom he had served in the British Navy. Mount Vernon, which was much enlarged by President Washington, was by him bequeathed to Bushrod Washington, upon whose death it came into the hands of John A. Washington, his nephew, who sold it in 1858 to the Ladies Mount Vernon Association, which holds it in trust as a national shrine._]