LETTER I.

YOU tell me and the public, that you, "with determined zeal and firmness, now openly declare war against me;" and that ‘I must certainly be the loser.’ Softly, 'Squire Webster: it is not so certain, perhaps, as you may imagine. If you had remembered the fable of the man who sold the lion's skin, and was afterwards killed in hunt­ing him, you would not have cried victoria! before you had given your antagonist time to return your fire.

[Page 80]This, Sir, I desire you to look upon as a coun­ter-declaration; as a preparative for repulsing the unprovoked attack. Your long, familiar, and modest address should have been answered this day (notwithstanding the certainty of my being the loser) did not the very extraordinary remarks it contains call for delay, in order to afford time for a full and fair discussion of a subject, of much greater importance than the "political creed" of a news-monger. In the mean time, Sir, be not too con­fident of victory. ‘Atchieve me first, good 'Squire, and then sell my bones.’

For your attachment to the government under which we live and prosper, and for the services (however trifling) you have rendered it, accept the respects of

LETTER II. TO MR. NOAH WEBSTER OF NEW-YORK.

SOME days ago I promised you an answer to your Address (or whatever else you may please to call it) of the 21st of March. It luckily matters little how this answer begins. Aware I suppose of the uncouth manners of the man you were about to assail, you kindly contrived that the rudeness of your attack should furnish an ample apology for his want of politeness.

Your Address treats of your important self, of me, and of the proposed alliance between the United States and Great Britain. This alliance is a subject of two much consequence to be blend­ed with an enquiry into your and my character, principles, and conduct, I shall therefore reserve it for a separate letter; not losing, however, the present opportunity of declaring, that your reason­ing, [Page 82] instead of convincing me that I was mista­ken, has strengthened, as far as any thing in it­self contradictory can strengthen, the opinion which gave so much offence to your wisdom.

You set out with telling the public, that, ‘in a late paper, we inserted sentiments of this kind, that the putting up in the Coffee House, a card, on which was painted the English flag, was a low pitiful business, equalled only by the meanness of putting up a French flag, and that it is servile to be bandied about between the flags of different foreign nations. We ought to unite under our own flag and learn to be a na­tion.’

You then complain of my having quoted the passage "with disapprobation," which with the application of the words vulgar prejudice, was, it seems, a stretch of presumption which your pride could not forgive.

I must confess, that, to venture to quote "with disapprobation" the oracular precepts flowing from the lips of the high priest of Mi­nerva, was rather bold; but (and with due sub­mission be it spoken) it was not so much your advice as your partiality, your versatility, that I disapproved of. You have uttered such cart­loads of sentiments, that it is absolutely impos­sible you should recollect one half of them; and as, in politics particularly, you are led by no fixed, no polar-star principle, it is as impossible that you should ever be consistent long together. Your saying that the putting up of an English flag "was a low pitiful business," sounds well; but did you say this when the French flag was [Page 83] put up? No; you called that neither low nor pitiful: it was even honoured with your ap­plause, as far as a man, who looks upon him­self as the exclusive possessor of all that is praise-worthy, can applaud the actions of others. The hoisting of the French flag was attended with feasting and noise, little inferior to what we have witnessed at the celebration of the murder of the Swiss Guards: yet it escaped your censure: it was suffered to hang very peaceably, and to re­ceive the adoration of the devout sans-culottes of New-York: folly was permitted to revel at the foot, as it were, of the shrine of wisdom, for the space of three whole years, without re­ceiving either chastisement or rebuke. But, be­hold the difference! The moment a representa­tion of the British flag appears, though painted on a bit of paper only, and intended merely to produce a little sport, you cast off your lethargic forbearance. Your patriotism, that patriotism, which slept like a dormouse, while the French flag was not only hanging up in the Coffee-Room, but was borne about your streets to elections and town-meetings; that drowsy patriotism, which seemed scarcely to perceive a banner of two yards square, though it brushed its very nose, became all alive, took fire in a moment, upon sight of a British flag in miniature.

You do, indeed, now talk about the ‘mean­ness of putting up a French flag;’ but when do you find courage to do this? At the moment the people around you are got tired and ashamed of their bauble. Far were you from calling it a meanness, and so far from it that your voice was one of the most sonorous in the ridiculous and [Page 84] disgraceful hue-and-cry, raised against those who pulled it down, in the month of May, 1795.— On that occasion you very patrioticly observed, that ‘it was hoped that the flags of the sister re­publics would have remained undisturbed by the enemies of our peace;’ and then, on you go to express your abhorrence of the conduct of the sacrilegious wretches whose impious hands had re­moved them. And, recollect, that you took spe­cial care not to utter a syllable against the savages, who attempted to murder a British Officer, to avenge "the mighty wrong." To intrude your precepts, therefore, at this time; to strut and hector over the poor fallen Tricolor, and to call on your readers to ‘unite under their own flag, and learn to be a nation,’ entitles you to but very little praise. Your advice comes too late. The patient was in a state of convalescence, be­fore you ventured to prescribe: French priva­teers, jails, whips, and irons, had effectually re­moved the malady of the public, while you stood fumbling its pulse. Had the same stupid admiration of the French, that prevailed, and that you participated in, for several years; had this admiration and its concomitant partiality still existed, you would never have dared (with all your heroism) to call the hoisting of their flag "a low pitiful business:" you would prudently have left that to a writer of less caution and more sincerity, reserving to yourself the agree­able task of endeavouring to disfigure his motives and blast his fame.

And, was it then such a heinous offence to quote a writer of your stamp ‘with disapproba­tion,’ or apply to him the charge of vulgar [Page 85] prejudice? It would be curious to hear, on what it is that you ground your right of exemption from all censure and criticism. Besides, to say that a man has adopted a vulgar prejudice, is cal­culated to give offence to no one but an illiterate booby, who does not know the meaning of the words, or a captious, inflated self-sufficient pe­dant. Yet it is this phrase, and this alone, that has provoked you to seek retaliation, and retalia­tion, too, of the most base and malicious species. —‘We contest (say you, after declaring that I am unable to cope with you) We contest Pe­ter's principles. It was strongly suspected many months ago, that his principles are not ve­ry friendly to the independence of America, and still less so to the form of our govern­ment.’

The grammatical inaccuracy of this last sen­tence, though fallen from the pen of a language-maker, it would be foreign to my purpose to re­mark on: it is the slander it conveys, that it is my duty to expose.—"It was strongly suspected." This is the true gossiping, calumniating style. All verbal assassins speak in the passive voice, that, what they cannot prove, they may at last throw on public report. If you had said, ‘I suspected many months ago,’ though it would have led to a detection, you would have acted more like a man; and this might have been expected too, in a volunteer of your ‘determined zeal and firmness.’

However, as you are very fond of the pom­pous plural number and passive voice, perhaps, it is but fair to suppose, that you mean to inti­mate, ²⁹ [Page 86] that you suspected my principles many months ago; and, if this was really the case, pray how came you to recommend my pamphlets to the perusal of your readers, as the best antedote to the anarchical principles of the enemies of the government? How many months ago was it that your penetration made the grand discovery? When I proposed publishing a paper, which was no more than about six weeks anterior to the date of your Address, you told the public in an exulting manner, that I should ‘prove a terri­ble scourge to the patriots,’ meaning Bache, Greenleaf, and all the antifederal crew. Six weeks 'Squire Webster, is not many months. If you really suspected my enmity to the government, and to the independence of America, you were a very great hypocrite, if not something of a traitor, to applaud my undertaking; and, if on the other hand, you had no such suspicion, and have now feigned it merely for the purpose of re­venging what your haughtiness has construed into an affront, I leave the public to determine what name you are worthy of.

But, you do not stop at suspicions. You seem to have foreseen that your readers would require something more than mere surmise, and you were determined to furnish it. When a man is once got into mischief, he does not stick at trifles. —‘This suspicion, say you, has been great­ly encreased by the manner in which Peter's Gazette has been conducted.’—Now, who, upon reading this, would not imagine, that my Gazette had discovered a departure from the principles which I had before professed; a spirit hostile to the government of this country, or [Page 87] at least unfriendly to it. Who would imagine that you, or any other man who wishes to pre­serve the least pretensions to candour, would have ventured to accuse another of enmity to the government upon a foundation slighter than this? Yet you can produce no such thing. Af­ter having turned and rummaged my poor gazette over and over again, pryed into every paragraph, and weighed each single expression, all you can collect to "increase" your suspicion, is, my ‘re­tailing abuse against la Fayette,’ and my pub­lishing whole columns, ‘filled with apologies for the old government of France!’ as if the sentiments of a man, respecting la Fayette and the French monarchy, formed a criterion where­by to estimate his attachment to the Constitution and Independence of the United States! Futile indeed must be the charge, that has no other support than such round-about kind of evidence as this.

I certainly might pass over with silent con­tempt, what, if strictly true, goes not an inch towards justifying your malignant insinuation; but, as you have been mean enough to take shelter under the popular, the ‘vulgar preju­dice,’ that prevails in favour of la Fayette and against monarchical governments, I shall take one step out of my way, in order to convince the public, that I shall never decline a combat with Noah Webster, though backed with the mis­placed partiality of millions.

What you are pleased to term, ‘retailing abuse against la Fayette,’ and, in another place, ‘vilifying the defenders of American Indepen­dence;’ [Page 88] all this put together, is, the publish­ing of a speech of Mr. Burke, on the motion brought forward in the British Parliament, for the purpose of prevailing on the king to inter­cede for la Fayette's release. This speech was published in my Gazette, of the 7th March; and, so far from its being an abusive, vilifying ha­rangue, though it is one of those pieces of ora­tory, that will for ages be an ornament to the proceedings of the British Commons, it is not more remarkable for its eloquence than for its truth.

You, indeed, tell us, that la Fayette's being "in fault, is doubtful, or not admitted:"—and in this short sentence, you have given a more com­plete specimen of the equivoque than is to be found in Boileau's famous poem on the subject. In the first place, we know not whether you express the opinion of others, or your own: next, if you are understood as expressing your own opinion, you declare the question doubtful, you do not admit the fault, and yet you do not venture to declare your friend innocent: lastly, should some warm partizan, whether royalist or republican, call you to account for hesitating on the subject, still you have a shift left; for you do not say, or even hint, whether it be la Fayette's crimes against the king, or those against the assembly, that you doubt of.—It was in the wars, I presume, that you learnt this precaution, of always se­curing a safe retreat.

To one, who so carefully disguises his sentiments, it is next to impossible to make a satisfactory re­ply: however, supposing you to doubt of la [Page 89] Fayette's fault with respect to his sovereign, I would ask you, where you have lived for these ten years last past? To hear you start doubts on this subject, one would imagine you had dwelt in a dormitory or a hermitage; that you had been absorbed in heavenly meditation; that your vessel (as the puritans call it) had been a resevoir of god­liness, in place of being what, alas! it is, a mere channel for news.

To enter into a minute examination of la Fay­ett's conduct, during his short-lived career in the French revolution, would be giving an impor­tance to his character which it does not deserve. It is true that he always was an underworker, like many others; and, therefore, is not to be reckoned among the miscreant Mirabeaus, Con­dorcets, &c. whose puppet he was; but, he ne­vertheless comes in for a considerable share of that censure which is due to a combination of ambiti­ous men, determined to build their own fame and greatness on the ruins of a mighty empire, without remorse for the miseries it must produce. One fact, when the merits of la Fayette are to be tried, ought never to be forgotten: it was his revoluti­onary brain that conceived the French Rights of Man, of which no more need be said, than that they are the very text from which Tom Paine has ever since been preaching the duty of holy insur­rection.

I would willingly believe that gratitude for the services which la Fayette rendered America, has now called forth your compassion for his suf­ferings, and your resentment against my paper, or rather against me. I would willingly trace your [Page 90] asperity back to this amiable source; but your past conduct tells me that I should attempt it in vain. How come you to be grateful to la Fayette alone? Has no other friend to the American re­volution lain on the damp floor of a dungeon? Never did you, (with shame be it spoken, Web­ster) never did you utter a word of compassion for the unfortunate friendless Louis XVI. when this same la Fayette was leading him in triumph from prison to prison. Never did you talk of cruel treatment, when the Queen of France was dragged in slow procession to Paris, while the myrmidons of this same la Fayette carried the ghastly heads of her murdered guards before her. No; you rejoiced at all this; and yet, I believe, no one will have the impudence to pretend, that la Fayette's services to this country, were a millionth part so great as those of poor Louis and his consort.—Nay, you saw the head of this fallen prince roll from the scaf­fold; you saw his family cut off one by one; you saw his innocent child lingering in a dungeon, robbed of sleep, terrified four times an hour with orders to prepare for death, and at last you saw his bloated and livid corpse stretched in a dung­cart.—On all this you looked with a philosphic eye. Not a tear escaped you; not a groan, not a sigh, was heard from the tender-hearted Miner­va, who now tells us that "la Fayette's sufferings call for the "sympathy of all mankind."

No, Sir, nor did you ever feel any thing wor­thy the name of compassion for la Fayette himself, or you would have expressed your abhorrence of the cruel and savage measures adopted against him and his family by the pretended republicans of France. That was the time for your gratitude [Page 91] and friendship to have shown itself. You, who ‘once voluntarily bore arms to defend indepen­dence, and who now with determined zeal and firmness openly declares war against the man who dares vilify the defenders of it,’ among whom you count la Fayette; you, Sir, should have stood forth against the then popular Convention, who had fixed a price on the head of your friend; who had, by law, authorized the citizens to shoot him, or knock his brains out, like a dog; nay, had imposed it on them as a duty. Then was the time for the blue-eyed Maid to grasp her javelin, and shelter the injured hero beneath her ample shield. As she neglected to do this; as she shrank from the encounter with popular fury; as she tamely yielded to the vulgar prejudice that then prevailed in favour of every act of the mock legis­lators of France, however cruel and infamous, she will now receive but little applause, from men of sense, for her censure of the Emperor of Germany, whose title alone, she well knows, will, with the gross of her readers, be a sufficient apology for any departure from decency and truth.

No, Sir; it is too clear, that a desire to ingra­tiate yourself with the deceived part of the public, together with that of injuring me, led you to bring forward the stalking horse la Fayette, and not any friendship, gratitude, or compassion that you entertained for him. This your manner of proceeding incontestibly proves. First, you pre­tend to suspect my enmity to the independence of America; then you artfully produce my publi­tion of Mr. Burke's censure of la Fayette, as a proof of that enmity, leaving your readers to draw the natural conclusion, that I had "retailed [Page 92] abuse" against him, merely for his having fought in the cause of Independence.—Never did envy and revenge suggest a baser insinuation, or one, the falshood of which was more easy to detect.

If I bear malice against la Fayette, if I have published a censure on him, if I have "retailed abuse against him," as you are pleased to call it, on account of his having served here, during the revolutionary war; pray, does it not follow, that I must bear the same malice, and feel the same inclination to censure every one who aided the cause of Independence? If such be the motive from which I act, I certainly could look round among those who did more injury to the cause of Great Britain in one day, nay in one minute, than la Fayette did during the war, or could have done in his whole life time. I call on you, then, to say whether I have ever, directly or indi­rectly, discovered an inclination to defame any man, merely because he was instrumental in establishing the independence of this country. Have I ever attempted to asperse, have I ever hinted any thing to the dishonour of, Mr. Jay, Mr. Adams, or General Washington? These gentlemen, the most eminent actors on the great drama of the revolution, have all been attacked, slandered and abused, by those who are among the eulogists of la Fayette; and I leave the public to determine, who has shown the most diligence, zeal and courage, in defence of their characters, Peter Porcupine or Noah Webster.

In pursuance of the same view it was, that you chose to comment on my having published ‘an [Page 93] apology for the old government of France,’ which you assert to be ‘as corrupt a system of despotism as Europe ever witnessed.’

To call the old government of France, which all the civilians have reckoned among the limited monarchies; to call this government a despotism, argues a mind strongly tinctured with the prin­ciples of liberty and equality; but, to say that it was as corrupt a system of despotism as Europe ever saw, puts you upon a level with the slander­ous haranguers of the suburbs of St. Antoine and St. Marceaw. He that can call the monar­chical government of France the worst of despo­tisms, would make little scruple to imitate the vénérable Père Du Chène, in branding St. Louis, Henry IV. and Louis the XVI. with the name of tyrants.

You do, however, allow that there is one species of government still worse than that of the French monarchy; and here your consistency is well worth attention. First the old government is as bad a one as Europe ever saw; then the Ja­cobin government is worse. This is not amiss; but you do not let us off so. After having thus acknowledged that the Jacobin government is worse than the worst, you have the conscience to quarrel with me, to wage eternal war with me, for censuring one of the principal founders of this very Jacobin government! You had forgot, or you never knew, the history of the first years of the French revolution. You contemplate your friend in the dungeon of Almutz only; you do not look back, and behold him in the tribune of the Jacobin Club at Paris. la Fayette was one ³⁰ [Page 94] of the very first, that took the name of Jacobin: he was a founder of the sect, and continued to be a member of it, till July, 1792. Even then he did not withdraw himself, but was expelled.

‘The old government, say you was not so bad as the Jacobin government, it is true; but there is a government different from both, which la Fayette sought, and which the people of this country will rejoice to see introduced; that is, a Free Government.’—Now, sir, what do you mean by a government that la Fayette sought? To hear you, one would imagine, that he had been foiled in some precious project for the good of his country; that his councils had been rejected, and himself persecuted on account of his probity and wisdom; whereas the very reverse of all this was the case. His projects succeeded to the utmost of his wishes. The famous rights of man, of which he was the proposer, became a fundamental law, was sanctioned and sworn to by the whole nation. The Constitution, grounded on those rights, he saw completed, and he retired from the legislative scene well pleased with his work. In short, the government he sought, he obtained, and a most stu­pid, base and cruel government it was. A govern­ment that acknowledged the horrid act of insur­rection to be a sacred duty, and that, in its prac­tice, made a beginning in that career of sacrilege, plunder and assassination, which has been so unre­mittingly pursued by succeeding and more suc­cessful usurpers. And this is what you call a Free Government; one that the people of America will be glad to see established in France! If the people of America are silly or wicked enough to enter­tain any such wish, I sincerely hope it may not be [Page 95] accomplished. The government they have now in France, is certainly a most abominable despot­ism, but it is not so destructive either in principle or practice, as that which la Fayette sought and assisted to form.

What involves you in these inconsistencies and contradictions is evident enough: you were a long time a very great admirer of the French revolu­tion. I will not say that I could make you blush, but I am certain I could make your friends blush, by a quotation from your paper in approbation of Tom Paine's Rights of Man, the manuel of Jaco­binism. Exactly how far you went hand in hand with the revolutionists, I know not; nor do I be-believe that you yourself know. You are in the predicament of a great many others, who, when they are asked what they approved and what they did not approve, answer, that they went as far as la Fayette, but no farther; and God knows that was far enough.

You, and all those who thus pinned their poli­tical faith on the sleeve of this unfledged states­man, would still have been revolutionists in the fullest sense of the term, had not the usurpers been preparing to extend their fraternal grasp to this government and country. Till then you care­fully avoided saying a word against them: all their most atrocious deeds were smoothed over; their plundering decrees, their invitations to re­bellion, were all right, till they cast their looks this way: then your eyes were opened at once: like Bailly and la Fayette, you adored the holy right of insurrection, till it began to operate against yourselves.

[Page 96]From this digression, which your straggling from your subject invited, I return to examine more closely the accusation of having published "an apology for the old government of France." This apology is contained in certain extracts from Gifford's answer to lord Lauderdale's letters to the Peers of Scotland. The writer observes with great justness, that ‘one of the most successful modes of exciting sentiments favourable to the French Revolution, has been the imputation of every vice creative of disgust to the old govern­ment of France.’ He then notices the scan­dalous neglect of candour and truth, that has been displayed in the performance of this task: the unfair mode of arguing that has been adopted, and the exaggeration and calumny that has im­posed on the uninformed. The object of all this, it is evident, has been not only to justify the re­volutionists in destroying the monarchy, but to in­culcate a belief, that the people, notwithstanding their present misery, are still gainers by the despo­tism that has been raised on its ruins.

To expose the falacy of this reasoning, to rec­tify the misconceptions of the weak, and to de­tect the misrepresentations of the wicked, Mr. Gifford enters into a candid examination of the subject, during which he proves, and that most satisfactorily, that the acts of oppression imputed to the French government, were generally, not to say always, exaggerated; that in many instan­ces the charges were totally unfounded, and even ridiculous; that in short, to the happiness of France, no revolution was necessary; and of course, that this dreadful scourge is to be ascrib­ed to the ambition and treachery of the usurp­ing legislators.

[Page 97]With respect to the extracts, in themselves considered, the facts they contain are of indisput­able authenticity; as to the style, it is as far above the criticism of Noah Webster, as it is be­yond his imitation; and I defy you to cull out a single sentiment, from beginning to end, which, by the most violent contorsion, can be called hostile to true liberty. The elegant and convinc­ing writer is an Englishman, and consequently knows how to estimate the blessings of freedom full as well, if not better than you. He is a scho­lar, and, which is more as to the present point, the author of a history of France, which has re­ceived the applause of the whole literary world, and which is the fruit of a long and painful re­search, during many years of residence in that country: of course his knowledge (particularly of whatever relates to the monarchy of France) is not to be sunk to a competition with that of a man, the greatest extent of whose travels has been from Connecticut to New-York, and the utmost exertion of whose talents is to be sought for in the compilation of a school-book. Lastly, the author of the ‘Apology for the old govern­ment of France’ is an independent gentleman, whose sole object in writing must be the attain­ment of honest fame; and who is not therefore, like a retailer of wisdom and news, obliged to vary his politics to the more than female caprice of the multitude.

But, to do you justice, I really believe, you possess too much good sense not to be, in the pre­sent instance, charmed with what you pretend to disapprove of. Whether you will be pleased to hear your judgment thus complimented at the [Page 98] expence of your sincerity, I neither know nor care; but it certainly was me, and not the ex­tracts in my paper that you were angry with, and that it was your object to decry. You wish­ed to propagate a belief that I was an enemy to the Independence of America, and also to the form of the federal government. The former charge, which has already been refuted, was to be looked upon as proved by my publishing Mr. Burke's censure on la Fayette; and the latter by my publishing, from Gifford, an apology for the old government of France.

The same shameful abandonment of candour, the same jesuitical spirit of perversion, that you dis­cover in your comments on what respects la Fay­ette, is still more apparant in what you say of the apology.—You tell your readers, that you sus­pect my enmity to the form of government under which we live; and add, that this suspicion is encreased by my publishing an apology for the old government of France. Here you stop without saying that my intention is to introduce the lat­ter form of government here: however, lest you should be misunderstood, of which you seem to have been much afraid, you afterwards revive the subject, and, addressing yourself to me, ve­ry gravely and very maliciously observe, that my ‘popularity, is not to be maintained by recom­mending the old government of France;’ there­by intimating that I had actually proposed the old government of France, which you call the worst of despotisms, as a substitute for the Fe­deral government of the United States! What a wretched attempt at imposition. This may well be termed, in your own flag language, ‘a [Page 99] a low pitiful business.’—You best know what stock of stupidity the readers of the Minerva are blessed with, but this I am certain of; that the clumsiest and most impudent vagabond Jugler never ventured to play off so barefaced a decepti­on to the gaping clowns at a country fair.—And were you, could you be, so completely infatuated as to hope that any man in his senses, any thing in human shape, would become the dupe of your spiteful insinuation? The thing is beyond the compass of belief: to attempt to disprove it would be useless: to give it a formal denial, or even to call it a lie, would be doing it too much honour.

After having shown the absurdity, the malice, of your pretended suspicions with respect to my political principles, you will permit me to ask you once more, why those suspicions were never awa­kened 'till lately?—Many of the men who fought for American Independence have been treated, in my writings, with much less mercy than Mr. Burke's speech treats la Fayette. Nay, I have never spared la Fayette himself, when I have had occasion to speak of him (and that has been very often) either individually or as a member of the Constitution making Assembly. And, as to the old government of France, I have often passed higher commendations on it, than Mr. Gifford does in the extracts you complain of. To be sure I never recommended it to the people of America, as you sillily insinuate I have done in publishing those extracts; but I have ventured ‘to predict, that, sooner or later, the French will return to that form of government under which they were happy, and under which alone they can [Page 100] ever be so again;’ and this I did in my Life and Adventures.—How came these things to e­scape your awful censure so long? How came you never before to think it your duty to repre­sent them as an indication of my enmity to the government and Independence of your country? You let me go on uninterrupted, pamphlet after pamphlet, for three whole years; yea, and even applauded my efforts all the time; and now, at last, you find me to be a dangerous fellow, and burst out upon me all at once, like a thunder from a summer cloud.

In vain would you make me believe, that any real suspicion, that any apprehension of my insin­cerity, has caused this change in your conduct towards me. It is possible, and barely possible, that your vanity has been unable to support the charge of vulgar prejudice, and has stimulated you to this unmanly mode of revenge. But, are you sure, Webster, that envy, cursed envy, has had nothing to do in the "low pitiful business?" Are you sure, that the 150 Porcupine's Gazettes, daily sent to your city, together with those which may probably have supplanted your's round your neighbourhood, thro' New England, and the Jer­seys: consult your heart and tell me, if you are sure, that it is not the spread of these innocent pa­pers, and not any thing which they contain, that has roused your lethargic patriotism.

It is ever painful to be obliged to think ill, and much more so to speak ill, of those that we have been accustomed to esteem, and I should hardly bring myself to impute your enmity to so dishono­rable a cause, were I not well assured that the im­putation is just.

[Page 101]Unfortunately for your reputation, it so hap­pens, that you possess a more satisfactory proof of my attachment to the government, than perhaps, any other man in the country does. The letter which I wrote you, when I requested you to pub­lish the proposals for my Gazette (a letter written in the fullest confidence) must have convinced any man, of a mind not indued with the quality of turning its nutriment to poison, that the American government had not a more sincere, more zealous, or more devoted friend than I. This letter, what­ever reluctance I might on any other occasion feel to suffer its appearance in print, I now call on you to publish in your paper; and, if you have one single grain of candour or justice left, you will not hesitate to comply with my request.

Here I should close, but there are two or three passages more in your Address, which so strongly invite attention, that your vanity might, perhaps, take the alarm again, were they to pass totally un­noticed; and, after having tasted so severely of the effects of your wrath, it is not to be wondered at, if I feel no inclination to brave it a second time.

You are so good as to inform me, ‘that you once voluntarily bore arms to defend Indepen­dence; that, in pursuance of the same princi­ples, you first proposed publickly the plan of a National Constitution; that, persevering in the same principles, you assailed the monster faction, the moment it appeared in the insidious form of popular clubs; and that, from that mo­ment to this present writing, you have never ceased to expose the artifices of the French agents to lay this country at the feet of France.³¹’

[Page 102]How all this got into a letter written about an English flag, I can't for my soul conceive. How­ever, 'tis news, and as such I am, in common with the rest of the trade, obliged to you for it.

I have read the history of the American war over and over again, but I do not recollect ever having seen the name of Noah Webster in it. That you were not very famous is therefore certain, and it is more than probable that you were looked up­on as mere food for powder, a situation that, what­ever might be the cause you were made use of in, is nothing at all to boast of.

Your being the ‘first who publickly proposed a National Constitution,’ is a curious anecdote enough; and I cannot say but I am glad it is come to light, as it will tend to quash, or at least to moderate, the exhorbitant pretensions of that unconscionable dog Tom Paine, who puts in an absolute claim to the whole credit of the invention. Tom does, indeed, confess, that he was anticipated by one writer on the subject, who insisted, that thirteen staves, without a hoop, would never make a barrel; and if you can make it out, as I have not the least doubt you can, that you were the real le­gitimate author of this shrewd and learned obser­vation, Tom must give way to you, or, at least, you must be permitted to come in with him for a share of the honour.

Thus you see I do not dispute your pretensions to military or constitution making fame, but as to your boldness in ‘assailing the monster FAC­TION; as to your perseverance and success in exposing the artifices of the French;’ these I [Page 103] do dispute, and not only dispute, but positively deny. You have, indeed, as far as you have found it prudent to go, latterly espoused the cause of or­der, and consequently that of the government; but, to do this with effect, you should have begun long enough before you did, and should have as­sumed a tone that never has been heard from the Minerva. At first you were a warm partizan of insurrection; you were among the abusers, the calumniators, of Burke, and the eulogists of Paine. At this epocha you were bold, because you acted with the crowd. When Genet's insolence awa­kened the suspicions of the people here, then you began to veer, to shuffle and to trim; and, from that time to the present moment you have been playing that double handed game, which, howe­ver profitable you may contrive to make it, en­titles you to the character of a Vicar of Bray. If my worthy patron, Bradford, is to be believed, your old friend, and partner in the language trade, Doctor Franklin, was six weeks in Congress, be­fore any one could divine whether he was a Whig or Tory; and I have frequently been at a loss to guess, such a compound is your politics, whether I ought to class you among the Federalists or De­mocrats. If these words have any meaning, as applied to you, you are a Democrat in principle, and a Federalist for convenience.

Not content with a malignant misrepresenta­tion of my motives and the meaning of my words, you must insult me with your advice. You tell me that I do not proceed in the right way to pre­serve my popularity, and caution me against pub­lishing what is "disrespectful to the opinions of Ame­ricans;" and thus you discover a servility of mind, [Page 104] that would be disgraceful even in a mendicant. When you form a jugment of me, Master Webster, and of what is likely to produce a change in my conduct, be so good as not to consult your own heart, for it will assuredly deceive you. Populari­ty may be your God, as indeed, it evidently is: so is it not mine. Small is the sacrifice that I would make at its shrine. A volume of the best of praise is not, with me, worth its weight in bread and cheese; and as to the stupid plaudits of a partial and prejudiced throng, I should think that they covered me with infamy instead of honour.

According to your notions of the liberty of the press, a man must not publish a word against la Fayette, though it be extracted from some other writer; because, forsooth, ‘it is extremely disre­spectful to the opinions of Americans!’ In other words, nothing must appear in a news-paper that does not perfectly chime in with the prevalent prejudice, however preposterous that prejudice may be, or however dangerous its tendency; and thus the press, in place of a censor, is to be a pa­risite, to the public; instead of being a terror to evil doers, it is to be the pander of folly and of vice.

That this has, for a long time, been the cha­racter of the American Press, as far as relates to news-papers, is but too true. Every one seems to have been upon the watch to find out the hu­mour of the public, and to accommodate his sentiments and even his news accordingly: hence it is that we have seen hundreds of eulogiums upon Robespierre and Marat, and have been seriously told that the French gained a victory [Page 105] over Lord Howe on the 1st of June, 1794. The motto of the Philadelphia Gazette, "THE PUBLIC WILL OUR GUIDE," would suit the whole of you, with a very few exceptions. The people are not told what is their interest, but what it is their wish, or rather the wish of the multitude, to hear. If any one dares to speak what he thinks; to publish what he conceives to be useful, if it happens to be contrary to the vulgar prejudice, he is told that he is disrespectful to the opinions of Americans.

According to the cant of the day, the people of a state, not governed by a monarch, is called the sovereign. For my part, I never hear talk of a sovereign people, of a society every individual of which is liable to the grasp of a catch-pole; I never do or can hear talk of such a sovereign without laughing. But, as such you look upon the people. Well then, to have an idea of your own servility, tell me what you would say of a news-printer in England, who should censure a­nother for publishing sentiments extremely disre­spectful to the opinions of the king? Would you not call him a slave, a poor rampant spaniel-like syco­phant? And, where is the difference, I would be glad to know, between crawling to a sovereign with one head and a sovereign with many?—No, Webster, your insinuations that I treat the people of America, or rather their opinions, with disre­spect, will never deter me from following the bent of my own inclination. In my publications, I hope, I shall always be guided by truth: how few I may please, or how many I may displease, is to me a matter of very little moment. I enter­tain, I trust, a due respect for the real people of [Page 106] this country, and a grateful sense of the liberal encouragement I have received from them; but neither this respect nor this gratitude will ever lead me so far as to flatter, what I look upon as a foible or a prejudice. I have no pretensions to patriotism, and as to disinterestedness, it is nonsense to talk of it; but, though gain be one principle object of my labours, I scorn to pursue it by the base means of trimming and truckling. No, Webster, the public will is not my guide: when my readers become so unreasonable as to require a suppression of every sentiment that does not ac­cord with their own, I will quit the trade of a news-monger, hire a garret, write Carmagnole bal­lads for the diversion of the sovereign people, and elegies on the departed liberty of the press.

You conclude by declaring your resolution to annoy me ‘by all those decent and legal means that distinguish the gentleman and the citizen.’ This I highly approve of, and on my part, I so­lemnly promise to oppose your annoyance by all those decent and legal means that distinguish the Porcupine; that is by pricking you every where and in every way that I can come at you.—After this candid declaration, you will undoubtedly look upon me as