the reflections you make on the
tendency of public demonstrations of attachment to the cause of France.
'Tis certainly not wise to expose ourselves to the jealousy and
resentment of the rest of the world, by a fruitless display of zeal for
that cause. It may do us much harm, and it can do France no good
(unless, indeed, we are to embark in the war with her, which nobody is
so hardy as to avow, though some secretly machinate it). It can not be
without danger and inconvenience to our interests, to impress on the
nations of Europe an idea that we are actuated by the _same spirit_
which has, for some time past, fatally misguided the measures of those
who conduct the affairs of France, and sullied a cause once glorious,
and that might have been triumphant. The cause of France is compared
with that of America during its late Revolution. Would to Heaven that
the comparison were just. Would to Heaven that we could discern in the
mirror of French affairs the same decorum, the same gravity, the same
order, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the
cause of the American Revolution. Clouds and darkness would not then
rest upon the issue as they now do. I own I do not like the comparison.
When I contemplate the horrid and systematic massacres of the second and
third of September; when I observe that a Murat and a Robespierre, the
notorious prompters of those bloody scenes, sit triumphantly in the
convention and take a conspicuous part in its measures--that an attempt
to bring the assassins to justice has been abandoned; when I see an
unfortunate prince, whose reign was a continued demonstration of the
goodness and benevolence of his heart, of his attachment to the people
of whom he was the monarch, who, though educated in the lap of
despotism, had given repeated proofs that he was not the enemy of
liberty, brought precipitately and ignominiously to the block without
any substantial proof of guilt, as yet disclosed--without even an
authentic exhibition of motives, in decent regard to the opinions of
mankind; when I find the doctrines of atheism openly advanced in the
convention, and heard with loud applauses; when I see the sword of
fanaticism extended to force a political creed upon citizens who were
invited to submit to the arms of France as the harbingers of liberty;
when I behold the hand of rapacity outstretched to prostrate and ravish
the monuments of religious worship, erected by those citizens and their
an