r allegiance to their proper country
by offering them the title of French citizen, so must I be compelled to
believe, that the title of French citizen conferred on Thomas Paine was
intended only as a mark of honorary respect towards a man who had
so eminently distinguished himself in defence of liberty, and on no
occasion more so than in promoting and defending your own revolution.
For a proof of this I refer you to his two works entitled _Rights of
Man_. Those works have procured to him an addition of esteem in America,
and I am sorry they have been so ill rewarded in France. But be this
title of French Citizen more or less, it is now entirely swept away by
the vote of the Convention which declares him to be a foreigner, and
which supercedes the vote of the Assembly that conferred that title upon
him, consequently upon the case superceded with it.

In consequence of this vote of the Convention declaring him to be a
foreigner the former Committees have imprisoned him. It is therefore
become my official duty to declare to you that the foreigner thus
imprisoned is a citizen of the United States of America as fully, as
legally, as constitutionally as myself, and that he is moreover one of
the principal founders of the American Republic.

I have been informed of a law or decree of the Convention which
subjects foreigners born in any of the countries at war with France
to arrestation and imprisonment. This law when applied to citizens of
America born in England is an infraction of the Treaty of Alliance and
of Amity and Commerce, which knows no distinction of American citizens
on account of the place of their birth, but recognizes all to be
citizens whom the Constitution and laws of America recognize as such.
The circumstances under which America has been peopled requires this
guard on her Treaties, because the mass of her citizens are composed not
of natives only but also of the natives of almost all the countries
of Europe who have sought an asylum there from the persecutions they
experienced in their own countries. After this intimation you will
without doubt see the propriety of modelling that law to the principles
of the Treaty, because the law of Treaty in cases where it applies is
the governing law to both parties alike, and it cannot be infracted
without hazarding the existence of the Treaty.

Of the Patriotism of Thomas Paine I can speak fully, if we agree to give
to patriotism a fixed idea consistent with that of