Yet the Westerners were the very people who had no cause whatever to complain of the treaty. It was not an entirely satisfactory treaty; perhaps a man like Hamilton might have procured rather better terms; but, taken as a whole, it worked an immense improvement upon the condition of things already existing. Washington's position was undoubtedly right. He would have preferred a better treaty, but he regarded the Jay treaty as very much better than none at all. Moreover, the last people who had a right to complain of it were those who were most vociferous in their opposition. The anti-Federalist party was on the whole the party of weakness and disorder, the party that was clamorous and unruly, but ineffective in carrying out a sustained policy, whether of offense or of defence, in foreign affairs. The people who afterwards became known as Jeffersonian Republicans numbered in their ranks the extremists who had been active as the founders of Democratic societies in the French interest, and they were ferocious in their wordy hostility to Great Britain; but they were not dangerous foes to any foreign government which did not fear words. Had they possessed the foresight and intelligence to strengthen the Federal Government the Jay treaty would not have been necessary. Futility of the State's-Rights Men in Foreign Affairs. Only a strong, efficient central government, backed by a good fleet and a well organized army, could hope to wring from England what the French party, the forerunners of the Jeffersonian Democracy, demanded. But the Jeffersonians were separatists and State's-rights men. They believed in a government so weak as to be ineffective, and showed a folly literally astounding in their unwillingness to provide for the wars which they were ready to provoke. They resolutely refused to provide an army or a navy, or to give the Central Government the power necessary for waging war. They were quite right in their feeling of hostility to England, and one of the fundamental and fatal weaknesses of the Federalists was the Federalist willingness to submit to England's aggressions without retaliation; but the Jeffersonians had no gift for government, and were singularly deficient in masterful statesmen of the kind imperatively needed by any nation which wishes to hold an honorable place among other nations. They showed their governmental ineptitude clearly enough later on when they came into power, for they at once stopped building the fleet which the Federalists had begun, and allowed the military forces of the nation to fall into utter disorganization, with, as a consequence, the shameful humiliations of the War of 1812. This war was in itself eminently necessary and proper, and was excellent in its results, but it was attended by incidents of shame and disgrace to America for which Jefferson and Madison and their political friends and supporters among the politicians and the people have never received a sufficiently severe condemnation.