etailing the line of conduct I shall pursue.

I have no occasion to ask, and do not intend to accept, any place or
office in the government.(1) There is none it could give me that would
be any ways equal to the profits I could make as an author, for I have
an established fame in the literary world, could I reconcile it to my
principles to make money by my politics or religion. I must be in every
thing what I have ever been, a disinterested volunteer; my proper sphere
of action is on the common floor of citizenship, and to honest men I
give my hand and my heart freely.

1 The President (Jefferson) being an intimate friend of
Paine, and suspected, despite his reticence, of sympathizing
with Paine's religions views, was included in the
denunciations of Paine ("The Two Toms" they were called),
and Paine here goes out of his way to soften matters for
Jefferson.--_Editor._.

I have some manuscript works to publish, of which I shall give proper
notice, and some mechanical affairs to bring forward, that will employ
all my leisure time. I shall continue these letters as I see occasion,
and as to the low party prints that choose to abuse me, they are
welcome; I shall not descend to answer them. I have been too much used
to such common stuff to take any notice of it. The government of England
honoured me with a thousand martyrdoms, by burning me in effigy in every
town in that country, and their hirelings in America may do the same.

City of Washington.

THOMAS PAINE.

LETTER II(1)

As the affairs of the country to which I am returned are of more
importance to the world, and to me, than of that I have lately left,
(for it is through the new world the old must be regenerated, if
regenerated at all,) I shall not take up the time of the reader with an
account of scenes that have passed in France, many of which are painful
to remember and horrid to relate, but come at once to the circumstances
in which I find America on my arrival.

Fourteen years, and something more, have produced a change, at least
among a part of the people, and I ask my-self what it is? I meet or hear
of thousands of my former connexions, who are men of the same principles
and friendships as when I left them. But a non-descript race, and of
equivocal generation, assuming the name of _Federalist_,--a name that
describes no character of principle good or bad, and may equally
be applied to either,--has since started up with