rt of it as will suit you to
undertake, will be at your choice. I have sustained so much loss, by
disinterestedness and inattention to money matters, and by accidents,
that I am obliged to look closer to my affairs than I have done. The
printer (an Englishman) whom I employed here to print the second part
of 'the Age of Reason' made a manuscript copy of the work while he was
printing it, which he sent to London and sold. It was by this means that
an edition of it came out in London.

"We are waiting here for news from America of the state of the federal
elections. You will have heard long before this reaches you that the
French government has refused to receive Mr. Pinckney as minister. While
Mr. Monroe was minister he had the opportunity of softening matters with
this government, for he was in good credit with them tho' they were in
high indignation at the infidelity of the Washington Administration.
It is time that Mr. Washington retire, for he has played off so much
prudent hypocrisy between France and England that neither government
believes anything he says.

"Your friend, etc.,

"THOMAS PAINE."

It would appear that Symonds' stolen edition must have got ahead of that
sent by Paine to Franklin Bache, for some of its errors continue in
all modern American editions to the present day, as well as in those of
England. For in England it was only the shilling edition--that
revised by Paine--which was suppressed. Symonds, who ministered to the
half-crown folk, and who was also publisher of replies to Paine, was
left undisturbed about his pirated edition, and the new Society for the
suppression of Vice and Immorality fastened on one Thomas Williams, who
sold pious tracts but was also convicted (June 24, 1797) of having sold
one copy of the "Age of Reason." Erskine, who had defended Paine at his
trial for the "Rights of Man," conducted the prosecution of Williams.
He gained the victory from a packed jury, but was not much elated by
it, especially after a certain adventure on his way to Lincoln's Inn. He
felt his coat clutched and beheld at his feet a woman bathed in tears.
She led him into the small book-shop of Thomas Williams, not yet called
up for judgment, and there he beheld his victim stitching tracts in a
wretched little room, where there were three children, two suffering
with Smallpox. He saw that it would be ruin and even a sort of murder to
take away to prison the husband, who was not a freethinker, and lamen