will be estimated between the
value of the commerce and the quantity of revenue that Louisiana will
produce.

The French Treasury is not only empty, but the Government has consumed
by anticipation a great part of the next year's revenue. A monied
proposal will, I believe, be attended to; if it should, the claims upon
France can be stipulated as part of the payment, and that sum can be
paid here to the claimants.

----I congratulate you on _The Birthday of the New Sun_,

now called Christmas Day; and I make you a present of a thought on
Louisiana.

T.P.

XXXIII. THOMAS PAINE TO THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES,

And particularly to the Leaders of the Federal Faction, LETTER I.(1)

1 The National Intelligencer, November 15th. The venerable
Mr. Gales, so long associated with this paper, had been in
youth a prosecuted adherent of Paine in Sheffield, England.
The paper distinguished itself by the kindly welcome it gave
Paine on his return to America. (See issues of Nov. 3 and
10, 1802.) Paine landed at Baltimore, Oct. 30th.--_Editor._,

After an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the
country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I
contributed my part.

When I sailed for Europe, in the spring of 1787, it was my intention to
return to America the next year, and enjoy in retirement the esteem of
my friends, and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm
of one revolution, and had no wish to embark in another. But other
scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were
allotted to me. The French revolution was beginning to germinate when I
arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied
from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of
faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold.
Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor,
and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this not to the prayers of
priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection
of Providence.

But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe,
I saw with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two
years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully
suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring
on the soil that produced them. I received at that time a letter