The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering. “Our proceedings,” wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789, “have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question.” Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over their wine till nine or ten in the evening. In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he felt obliged to decline, as being inconsistent with his post of minister to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult situation in Paris. What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch contributed to “the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco,” a mass of material which included thirty cables, seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one “very large watch.”