"P.S. Since writing the above we have received a report that the French Directory has proposed a declaration of war against the United States to the Council of Ancients, who have rejected it. Thus we see two nations who love one another affectionately, brought by the ill temper of their executive administrations to the very brink of a necessity to imbrue their hands in the blood of each other."

On the 14th of February, 1799,[71] he says, "The President has appointed, and the senate approved, Rufus King, to enter into a treaty of commerce with the Russians, at London, and William Smith (Phocion) envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to go to Constantinople to make one with the Turks. So that as soon as there is a coalition of Turks, Russians, and English against France, we seize that moment to countenance it as openly as we dare, by treaties which we never had with them before. All this helps to fill up the measure of provocation towards France, and to get from them a declaration of war which we are afraid to be the first in making."

If these sentiments, in perfect coincidence with the pretensions of France, and censuring the neutral course of the American government, were openly avowed by Mr. Jefferson; if, when they appeared embodied in a letter addressed to a correspondent in Europe, and republished throughout the United States, they remained, even after becoming the topic of universal interest and universal excitement, totally uncontradicted, who could suspect that any one sentence, particularly that avowing a sentiment so often expressed by the writer, had been interpolated?

Yet Mr. Jefferson, unmindful of these circumstances, after some acrimonious remarks on Colonel Pickering, has said,[72] "and even Judge Marshall makes history descend from its dignity, and the ermine from its sanctity, to exaggerate, to record, and to sanction this forgery."

The note itself will best demonstrate the inaccuracy of this commentary. To this text an appeal is fearlessly made.

This unmerited invective is followed by an accusation not less extraordinary. It is made a cause of crimination that the author has copied the remark of the Parisian editor, instead of the letter itself.

To remove this reproach, he will now insert the letter, not as published in Europe, and transferred from the French to the American papers, but as preserved and avowed by Mr. Jefferson, and given to the world by his grandson. It is in these words.

"Monticello, April 24th, 1796.[73]

"My Dear Friend,

"The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war, an Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance as it has already done the forms of the British government. The main body of our citizens, however, remain true to their republican principles; the whole landed interest is republican, and so is a great mass of talents. Against us are the executive, the judiciary, two out of three branches of the legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capitals, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labours and perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the good side is so great as to leave no danger that force will ever be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded our labours.