lace, to the prejudice of the Empress. In writing
some notes of the life of Captain Lewis, prefixed to his 'Expedition to
the Pacific,' I stated, that the Empress gave the permission asked, and
afterwards retracted it. This idea, after a lapse of twenty-six years,
had so insinuated itself into my mind, that I committed it to paper,
without the least suspicion of error. Yet I find, on returning to my
letters of that date, that the Empress refused permission at once,
considering the enterprise as entirely chimerical. But Ledyard would
not relinquish it, persuading himself, that, by proceeding to St.
Petersburg, he could satisfy the Empress of its practicability, and
obtain her permission. He went accordingly, but she was absent on a
visit to some distant part of her dominions, and he pursued his course
to within two hundred miles of Kamtschatka, where he was overtaken by an
arrest from the Empress, brought back to Poland, and there dismissed.
I must, therefore, in justice, acquit the Empress of ever having for
a moment countenanced, even by the indulgence of an innocent passage
through her territories, this interesting enterprise.

The pecuniary distresses of France produced this year a measure,
of which there had been no example for near two centuries; and the
consequences of which, good and evil, are not yet calculable. For its
remote causes, we must go a little back.

Celebrated writers of France and England had already sketched good
principles on the subject of government: yet the American Revolution
seems first to have awakened the thinking part of the French nation
in general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk. The
officers, too, who had been to America, were mostly young men, less
shackled by habit and prejudice, and more ready to assent to the
suggestions of common sense, and feeling of common rights, than
others. They came back with new ideas and impressions. The press,
notwithstanding its shackles, began to disseminate them; conversation
assumed new freedoms; politics became the theme of all societies, male
and female, and a very extensive and zealous party was formed, which
acquired the appellation of the Patriotic party, who, sensible of the
abusive government under which they lived, sighed for occasions for
reforming it. This party comprehended all the honesty of the kingdom,
sufficiently at leisure to think, the men of letters, the easy
Bourgeois, the young nobility, partly from reflection,