The course pursued both by Britain and Spain rendered the task of the executive still more arduous, by furnishing weapons to the enemies of neutrality, capable of being wielded with great effect.
The resentment excited by the rigour with which the maritime powers of Europe retained the monopoly of their colonial commerce, had, without the aid of those powerful causes which had lately been brought into operation, been directed peculiarly against Great Britain.

These resentments had been greatly increased.

That nation had not mitigated the vexations and inconveniences which war necessarily inflicts on neutral trade, by any relaxations in her colonial policy.
[Sidenote: Decree of the national convention relative to neutral commerce.] To this rigid and repulsive system, that of France presented a perfect contrast.

Either influenced by the politics of the moment, or suspecting that, in a contest with the great maritime nations of Europe, her commerce must search for security in other bottoms than her own, she opened the ports of her colonies to every neutral flag, and offered to the United States a new treaty, in which it was understood that every mercantile distinction between Americans and Frenchmen should be totally abolished.
With that hasty credulity which, obedient to the wishes, can not await the sober and deliberate decisions of the judgment, the Americans ascribed this change, and these propositions, to the liberal genius of freedom; and expected the new commercial and political systems to be equally durable.

As if, in the term REPUBLIC, the avaricious spirit of commercial monopoly would lose its influence over men; as if the passions were to withdraw from the management of human affairs, and leave the helm to the guidance of reason, and of disinterested philanthropy; a vast proportion of the American people believed this novel system to be the genuine offspring of new-born liberty; and consequently expected that, from the success of the republican arms, a flood of untried good was to rush upon the world.
The avidity with which the neutral merchants pressed forward to reap the rich and tempting harvest offered to them by the regulations and the wants of France, presented a harvest not less rich and tempting to the cruisers of her enemies.