to the payment of a douceur of twelve hundred thousand livres, with a positive engagement to advance to the French government a sum equal to the amount of the spoliations of our trade, and a further engagement to send to our government for power to purchase of France thirty-two millions of the inscriptions (12,800,000 dollars); in return for all which, our envoys were to be permitted to remain six months in Paris, depredations on our trade during that time were to be suspended, and a commission of five persons was to be appointed to liquidate the claims for past depredations which were to be satisfied "in a time and manner to be agreed upon." The substance of these demands is to pay absolutely twenty millions of dollars more than the estimated amount of the spoliations; for what? Barely for the acknowledg ment of a debt due to our citizens, which, without it, is not the less due, and for the suspension of hostilities* for six months.

Afterwards, in a conversation between the French minister himself and one of our envoys, the propositions assumed another form. The United States were required to purchase of France at par sixteen millions of inscriptions, and to promise further aid when in their power. This arrangement being first made, and not before, France was to take measures for reimbursing the equitable demands of our citizens on account of captures.

The purchase of the inscriptions was to be a preliminary. The arrangement for reimbursing our merchants was to follow. The nature of it was not explained; but it is to be inferred from all that preceded, that the expedient of the advance of an equal sum by the United States would have been pressed as the basis of the promised arrangement. This last proposal was in its principle as bad as either of the former; its tendency worse. The promise of future assistance would have carried with it the privi lege to repeat at pleasure the demand of money, and to dispute with us about our ability to supply; and it would have embarked us as an associate with France in the war. It was to promise her the most effectual aid in our power, and that of which she stood most in need.

* It is observable that the French give themselves the denomination of hostilities to their depredations upon us. Our Jacobins would have us consider them as gentle caresses.

The scheme of concealment was a trick. The interest of France to engage us in the war against Great Britain, as a mean of wounding her commerce, is too strong to have permitted the secret to be kept by her. By the ratification of the treaty, in which the Senate must have concurred, too many would have obtained possession of the secret to allow it to remain one. While it did, the apprehension of discovery would have enabled France to use it as an engine of unlimited extortion. But a still greater objection is, that it would have been infamous in the United States, thus covertly to relinquish their neutrality, and with equal cowardice and hypocricy to wear the mask of it, when they had renounced the reality.

The idea of securing our advances, by means of the debt which we owe to the Dutch, is without foundation. The credi. tors of the United States are the private citizens of the Batavian republic. Their demands could not be opposed by a claim of our government upon their government. The only shape in which it could be attempted, must be in that of reprisals for the delinquency of the government. But this would not only be a gross violation of the principle, it would be contrary to express stipulations in the contracts for the loans.*

In the same spirit of deception it has also been alleged that our envoys, by giving the douceur of twelve hundred thousand livres, and agreeing to send for powers to make a loan, might have obtained a suspension of depredations for six months There is not a syllable in the dispatches to countenance this assertion. A large advance in addition, either on the basis of the spoliations, or by way of purchase of the inscriptions, is uniformly made the condition of suspending hostilities.

Glosses so false and insidious as these, in a crisis of such imminent public danger, to mislead the opinion of our nation concerning the conduct and views of a foreign enemy, are shoots from a pernicious trunk.

Opportunity alone is wanting to unveil the treason which lurks at the core.

What signifies the quantum of the contribution had it been

* They all provide against seizure or sequestration by way of reprisals, &c.

really as unimportant as it is represented? 'Tis the principle which is to be resisted at every hazard. 'Tis the pretention to make us tributary, in opposition to which every American ought to resign the last drop of his blood.

The pratings of the Gallic faction at this time remind us of those of the British faction at the commencement of our revolution.

The insignificance of a duty of three pence per pound on tea was echoed and re-echoed as the bait to an admission of the right to bind us in all cases whatsoever.

The tools of France incessantly clamor against the treaty with Britain as the just cause of the resentment of France. It is curious to remark, that in the conferences with our envoys this treaty was never once mentioned by the French agents. Particular passages in the speech of the President are alone specified as a ground of dissatisfaction. This is at once a specimen of the fruitful versatility with which causes of complaint are contrived, and of the very slight foundations on which they are adopted. A temperate expression of sensibility at an outrageous indignity, offered to our government by a member of the Directory, is converted into a mortal offence. The tyrants will not endure a murmur at the blows they inflict. But the dispatches of our envoys, while they do not sanction the charge preferred by the Gallic faction against the treaty, confirm a very serious charge. which the friends of the government bring against that faction. They prove by the unreserved confession of her agents, that France places absolute dependence on this party in every event, and counts upon their devotion to her as an encouragement to the hard conditions which they attempt to impose. The people of this country must be infatuated indeed, if after this plain confession they are at a loss for the true source of the evils they suffered, or may hereafter suffer from the despots of France. "Tis the unnatural league of a portion of our citizens with the oppressors of their country.

TITUS MANLIUS.

A FRENCH FACTION.

1798.

There is a set of men whose mouths are always full of the phrases, British faction-British agents-British influence. Feeling that they themselves are interested in a foreign faction, they imagine that it must be so with every one else—and that whoever will not join with them in sacrificing the interests of their country to another country, must be engaged in an opposite foreign faction-Frenchmen in all their feelings and wishes, they can see in their opponents nothing but Englishmen. Every true American-every really independent man, becomes in their eyes, a British agent-a British emissary.

The truth is, that there is in this country a decided French faction, but no other foreign faction. I speak as to those who have a share in the public councils, or in the political influence of the country-those who adhered to Great Britain during the revolution may be presumed, generally, to have still a partiality for her. But the number of those who have at this time any agency in public affairs, is very insignificant. They are neither numerous nor weighty enough to form in the public councils a distinct faction. Nor is it to this description of men that the passage is applied.

The satellites of France have the audacity to bestow it upon men who have risked more in opposition to Great Britain, than but few of them ever did-to men who have given every possible proof of their exclusive devotion to the interests of their own country. Let facts speak. The leaders of the French faction during the war managed to place the minister of the country abroad in a servile dependence on the ministry of France, and but for the virtuous independence of those men, which led them to break their instructions, it is very problematical we should have had as early, or as good a peace as that we obtained. The same men, during the same period, effected the revocation of a commission which had been given for making a commercial

treaty with Great Britain, and again, on the approach of peace, defeated an attempt to produce a renewal of that commission, and thus lost an opportunity known to have been favorable for establishing a beneficial treaty of commerce with that country— though they have since made the obtaining of such a treaty, a pretext for reiterated attempts to renew hostilities with her. The same men have been constantly laboring, from the first institution of the present government, to render it subservient, not to the advancement of our own manufactures, but to the advancement of the navigation and manufactures of France.

In a proposal which aims at fostering our own navigation and elevating our own manufactures, by giving them advantages over those of all foreign nations, a thousand obstacles occur--a thousand alarms are sounded-usurpation of ungranted powersdesigns to promote the interests of particular parts of the Union at the expense of other parts of it, and innumerable other spectres are conjured up to terrify us from the pursuit. Is the project to confer particular favors upon the navigation and manufactures of France, even at the expense of the United States-then all difficulties vanish. This is the true and only object of the Constitution-for this it was framed-by this alone it can live and have a being. To this precious end, we are assured, the States who may particularly suffer, will be willing to sacrifice. In this holy cause we are to risk every thing-our trade, our navigation-our manufactures-our agriculture-our revenues-our peace. Not to consent is to want spirit-to want honor-to want patriotism. Thus does Gallicism assume the honorable part of patriotism.

THE WAR IN EUROPE.

1799.

Every step of the progress of the present war in Europe has been marked with horrors. If the perpetration of them was confined to those who are the acknowledged instruments of des