daring attack upon YOUR Sovereignty,-which you are bound, by every motive of duty and self-preservation, to withstand and defeat. The matter might safely be suffered to rest here: but I shall take a future opportunity to examine the reasonableness of the prejudice which is inculcated against excise laws, and which has become the pretext for excesses tending to dissolve the bands of society.

Fellow-citizens: You are told that it will be intemperate to urge the execution of the laws which are resisted. What? Will it be indeed intemperate in your Chief Magistrate, sworn to maintain the Constitution, charged faithfully to execute the laws, and authorized to employ for that purpose force, when the ordinary means fail-will it be intemperate in him to exert that force, when the Constitution and the laws are opposed by force? Can he answer it to his conscience, to you, not to exert it?

Yes, it is said; because the execution of it will produce civil war-the consummation of human evil.

Fellow-citizens: Civil war is, undoubtedly, a great evil. It is one that every good man would wish to avoid, and will deplore if inevitable. But it is incomparably a less evil than the destruction of Government. The first brings with it serious but temporary and partial ills: the last undermines the foundations of our security and happiness; and where should we be if it were once to grow into a maxim, that force is not to be used against the seditious combinations of parts of the community to resist the laws? This would be to give a CARTE BLANCHE to ambition, to licentiousness, to foreign intrigue, to make you the prey of the gold of other nations-the sport of the passions and vices of individuals among yourselves. The hydra Anarchy would rear its head in every quarter. The goodly fabric you have established would be rent asunder, and precipitated into the dust. You knew how to encounter civil war rather than surrender your liberty to foreign domination; you will not hesitate now to brave it rather than to surrender your sovereignty to the tyranny of a faction; you will be as deaf to the apostles of anarchy now as you were to the emissaries of despotism then. Your love of liberty will guide you now as it did then; you know that the POWER of the major

ity and LIBERTY are inseparable. Destroy that, and this perishes. But, in truth, that which properly can be called civil war is not to be apprehended-unless from the act of those who endeavor to fan the flame, by rendering the Government odious. A civil war is a contest between two GREAT parts of the same empire. The exertion of the strength of the nation to suppress resistance to its laws, by a sixtieth part of itself, is not of that description. After endeavoring to alarm you with the horrors of civil war, an attempt is made to excite your sympathy in favor of the armed faction, by telling you that those who compose it are men who understand the principles of freedom, and know the horrors and distresses of anarchy, and must therefore have been prompted to hostility against the laws by a radical defect EITHER in the government OR in its administration. Fellow-citizens, for an answer to this you have only to consult your senses. The natural consequences of radical defect in a government, or in its administration, are national distress and suffering. Look around you-where is it? Do you feel it? Do you see it?

Go in quest of it beyond the Alleghany, and instead of it you will find that there also a scene of unparalleled prosperity upbraids the ingratitude and madness of those who are endeavoring to cloud the bright face of our political horizon, and to mar the happiest lot that beneficent Heaven ever indulged to undeserving mortals.

When you have turned your eyes towards that scene, examine well the men whose knowledge of the principles of freedom is so emphatically vaunted-where did they get their better knowledge of those principles than that which you possess? How is it that you have been so blind or tame as to remain quiet, while they have been goaded into hostility against the laws by a RADICAL DEFECT in the government or its administration? Are Are you willing to yield them the palm of discernment, of patriotism, or of courage?

TULLY.

IV.

Sept. 2, 1794.

The prediction mentioned in my first letter begins to be fulfilled. Fresh symptoms every moment appear of a dark conspiracy, hostile to your government, to your peace abroad, to your tranquillity at home. One of its orators dares to prostitute the name of FRANKLIN, by annexing it to a publication as insidious as it is incendiary. Aware of the folly and the danger of a direct advocacy of the cause of the insurgents, he makes the impudent attempt to enlist your passions in their favor by false and virulent railings against those who have heretofore represented you in Congress. The foreground of the piece presented you with a bitter invective against that wise, moderate, and pacific policy, which in all probability will rescue you from the calamities of a foreign war, with an increase of new dignity and with additional lustre to the American name and character. Your representatives are delineated as corrupt, pusillanimous, and unworthy of your confidence; because they did not plunge headlong into measures which might have rendered war inevitable; because they contented themselves with preparing for it, instead of making it, leaving the path open to the Executive for one last and solemn effort of negotiation; because they did not display either the promptness of gladiators, or the blustering of bullies, but assumed that firm, yet temperate attitude, which alone is suited to the representatives of a brave but rational people; who deprecated war, though they did not fear it; and who have a great and solid interest in peace, which ought only to be abandoned when it is unequivocally ascertained that the sacrifice is absolutely due to the vindication of their honor and the preservation of their essential rights; because, in fine, your representatives wished to give an example to the world, that the boasted moderation of republican governments was not (like the patriotism of our political barkers) an empty declaration, but a precious reality.

The sallies of a momentary sensibility, roused and stung by

injury, were excusable. It was not wonderful, that the events of war were under the first impressions heard from good and prudent men. But to revive them at this late hour, when fact and reflection unite to condemn them; to arraign a conduct which has elevated the national character to the highest point of true glory; to hope to embark you in the condemnation of that conduct, and to make your indignation against it useful to the cause of insurrection and treason, are indications of a wrong-headedness, perverseness, or profligacy, for which it is not easy to find terms of adequate reprobation.

Happily the plotters of mischief knew ye not. They derive what they mistake for your image from an original in their own heated and crooked imaginations, and they hope to mould a wise, reflecting, and dispassionate people to purposes which presuppose an ignorant, unthinking, and turbulent herd.

But the declamation against your representatives for their love of peace, is but the preface to the main design. That design is to alienate you from the support of the laws, by the spectre of an odious excise system, baneful to liberty, engendered by corruption, and nurtured by the INSTRUMENTALITY (favored word, fruitful source of mountebank wit) of the enemies of freedom.

TULLY.

HORATIUS.

To the People of the United States.

COUNTRYMEN AND FELLOW-CITIZENS:

May, 1795.

Nothing can be more false or ridiculous, justly considered, than the assertion that great sacrifices of your interests are made in the treaty with Great Britain.

As to the controverted points between the two nations, the treaty provides satisfactorily for the great and essential ones; and only foregoes objects of an inferior and disputable nature, of

no real consequence to the permanent welfare of the country. As to trade, the dilemma is this: if an article is added for granting us such privileges in the British West Indies, as are satisfactory to us, it will give a duration of TWELVE years to the treaty, and will render it as good a one as the most sanguine could desire, and a better one than any other power of Europe can make with us; for no other power in Europe can give us the advantages in the East Indies, which this treaty confers.

If that article be not added, the commercial part of the treaty will expire in Two years after the present war, by its own limitation.

It is therefore preposterous to talk of great sacrifices in a commercial sense. This observation is to be understood with the exception of the third article; which regulates the trade between us and the neighboring British territories, which is permanent, and which is certainly a precious article; inevitably throwing into our lap the greatest part of the fur trade, with the trade of the two Canadas. This is a full answer to the idle tale of sacrifices by the treaty, as the pretext for violating your Constitution, and for sullying your faith and your honor.

It is an unquestionable truth, fellow-citizens, one which it is essential you should understand, that the great and cardinal sin of the treaty in the eyes of its adversaries is, that it puts an end to controversy with Great Britain.

We have a sect of politicians among us, who, influenced by a servile and degrading subserviency to the views of France, have adopted it as a fundamental tenet, that there ought to subsist between us and Great Britain, eternal variance and discord.

What we now see is a part of the same system which led the ministry of Louis the XVIth to advise our commissioners for making peace to treat with Great Britain without the acknowledgment of our independence; wishing that the omission of this acknowledgment might perpetuate a jealousy and dread of Great Britain, and occasion a greater necessity for our future dependence on France.

It is a part of the same system, which, during our war with. Great Britain, produced a resolution of our public councils, with