Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. I.djvu/109

JOHN ADAMS 79 gennes, who wished the Americans to feel ex clusively dependent upon France, and to have no other friendships or alliances. From first to last the aid extended by France to the Americans in the revolutionary war was purely selfish. That despotic government wished no good to a people struggling to preserve the immemorial principles of English liberty, and the policy of Vergennes was to extend just enough aid to us to enable us to prolong the war, so that colonies and mother country might alike be weakened. When he pre tended to be the disinterested friend of the Ameri cans, he professed to be under the influence of senti ments that he did not really feel; and he thus suc ceeded in winning from congress a confidence to which he was in no wise entitled. But he could not hoodwink John Adams, who wrote home that the duke de la Vauguyon, the French ambassador at The Hague, was doing everything in his power to obstruct the progress of the negotiations; and in this, Adams correctly inferred, he was acting under secret instructions from Vergennes. As a diplo matist Adams was in a certain sense Napoleonic; he introduced new and strange methods of war fare, which disconcerted the perfidious intriguers of the old school, of which Vergennes and Talley rand were typical examples. Instead of beating about the bush and seeking to foil trickery by trickery (a business in which the wily Frenchman