That there was a "double game" in this business, from first to last, is now a fact of history. Jay was confirmed by the Senate on a declaration of the President in which no faintest hint of a treaty was given, but only the "adjustment of our complaints," "vindication of our rights," and cultivation of "peace." Only after the Envoy's confirmation did the Cabinet add the main thing, his authority to negotiate a commercial treaty. This was done against the protest of the only lawyer among them, Edmund Randolph, Secretary of State, who said the exercise of such a power by Jay would be an abridgment of the rights of the Senate and of the nation. See my "Life of Randolph," p. 220. For Jay's Instructions, etc., see I. Am. State Papers, Foreign Relations.--Editor. It is curious to observe, how the appearance of characters will change, whilst the root that produces them remains the same. The Washington faction having waded through the slough of negociation, and whilst it amused France with professions of friendship contrived to injure her, immediately throws off the hypocrite, and assumes the swaggering air of a bravado. The party papers of that imbecile administration were on this occasion filled with paragraphs about _Sovereignty_. A paltroon may boast of his sovereign right to let another kick him, and this is the only kind of sovereignty shewn in the treaty with England. But those daring paragraphs, as Timothy Pickering(1) well knows, were intended for France; without whose assistance, in men, money, and ships, Mr. Washington would have cut but a poor figure in the American war. But of his military talents I shall speak hereafter. I mean not to enter into any discussion of any article of Jay's treaty; I shall speak only upon the whole of it. It is attempted to be justified on the ground of its not being a violation of any article or articles of the treaty pre-existing with France. But the sovereign right of explanation does not lie with George Washington and his man Timothy; France, on her part, has, at least, an equal right: and when nations dispute, it is not so much about words as about things.