He could not adjourn, but was compelled to quiet rivalries, allay irritated feelings, and ride the storm as best he might.

It was all done, however, in one way or another: by personal appeals, and by letters full of dignity, patriotism, and patience, which are very impressive and full of meaning for students of character, even in this day and generation.
Then again, not content with snarling up our native appointments, Congress complicated matters still more dangerously by its treatment of foreigners.

The members of Congress were colonists, and the fact that they had shaken off the yoke of the mother country did not in the least alter their colonial and perfectly natural habit of regarding with enormous respect Englishmen and Frenchmen, and indeed anybody who had had the good fortune to be born in Europe.

The result was that they distributed commissions and gave inordinate rank to the many volunteers who came over the ocean, actuated by various motives, but all filled with a profound sense of their own merits.

It is only fair to Congress to say that the American agents abroad were even more to blame in this respect.