If Great Britain, toward whom the animosity of the recent war was still strong, had not been a monarchy, or if the revolution which changed our Revolutionary benefactress, France, into a republic, had happened in England, or if the French Revolution had not so closely followed in form the change in the United States from monarchy to republicanism, party animosity in America would have been checked instead of advanced by the Old World contest. The same end might have been reached if John Adams had been sent as Minister to France and Thomas Jefferson to England. But Britain being the token of centralisation, the general tendency of the United States toward unionism seemed to Jefferson to be the certain road to monarchism. This he conceived to be the ultimate aim of Hamilton, born in the British West Indies, and Adams, who had returned from Britain with his obnoxious theory that the "well-born" ought to rule the remainder of the people. The attempt of France, on the contrary, to secure the rights of man, with which Jefferson had grown familiar during his residence in that country, appealed to him both from a national and a personal standpoint. "I still hope," he said in one of those periods of French excess which bade fair to ruin the whole, "that the French Revolution will issue happily. I feel that the permanence of our own leans in some degree on that, and that a failure there would be a powerful argument to prove that there must be a failure here." "A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious," said Hamilton, in giving a Cabinet opinion that the treaty made with France in 1778 had been annulled by the abrogation of the monarchy and the execution of Louis XVI. "But if sullied by crimes and extravagance it loses respectability. It appears, thus far, too probable that the pending Revolution in France has sustained some serious blemishes." In another place he voiced the sentiments of the anti-French by saying that thus far no proof had come to light sufficient to establish a belief that the execution of the King was an act of national justice. But the French sympathisers thought otherwise. "If he was a traitor he ought to be punished as well as another man," wrote Madison to Jefferson, quoting the sentiment among the plain people of Virginia.