reafter be ready to say, as Gouverneur Morris said to me, after having
abused me pretty handsomely in Congress for the opposition I gave
the fraudulent demand of Silas Deane of two thousand pounds sterling:
"_Well, we were all duped, and I among the rest!_"(1)

1 See vol. I., chapters xxii., xxiii., xxiv., of this work.
Also my "Life of Paine," vol. I., ch. ix., x.--_Editor._

Were the late administration to be called upon to give reasons for
the expence it put the country to, it can give none. The danger of an
invasion was a bubble that served as a cover to raise taxes and armies
to be employed on some other purpose. But if the people of America
believed it true, the cheerfulness with which they supported those
measures and paid those taxes is an evidence of their patriotism; and
if they supposed me their enemy, though in that supposition they did me
injustice, it was not injustice in them. He that acts as he believes,
though he may act wrong, is not conscious of wrong.

But though there was no danger, no thanks are due to the late
administration for it. They sought to blow up a flame between the two
countries; and so intent were they upon this, that they went out of
their way to accomplish it. In a letter which the Secretary of State,
Timothy Pickering, wrote to Mr. Skipwith, the American Consul at Paris,
he broke off from the official subject of his letter, to _thank God_ in
very exulting language, _that the Russians had cut the French army
to pieces_. Mr. Skipwith, after showing me the letter, very prudently
concealed it.

It was the injudicious and wicked acrimony of this letter, and some
other like conduct of the then Secretary of State, that occasioned me,
in a letter to a friend in the government, to say, that if there was any
official business to be done in France, till a regular Minister could
be appointed, it could not be trusted to a more proper person than Mr.
Skipwith. "_He is_," said I, "_an honest man, and will do business, and
that with good manners to the government he is commissioned to act with.
A faculty which that BEAR, Timothy Pickering, wanted, and which the BEAR
of that bear, John Adams, never possessed_."(2)

2 By reference to the letter itself (p. 376 of this volume)
it will be seen that Paine here quotes it from memory.--
_Editor._ vol III--

In another letter to the same friend, in 1797, and which was put
unsealed under cover to Colonel Burr, I expressed a sati