Gazette Of The United States And Daily Evening Advertiser

From the general Advertiser.

The aristocratical prints affect to represent the execution of Robespierre as a victory over the republicans of this country, who, they pretend always considered him as the great luminary of French democracy. His death, on the contrary, is an instance in proof of the soundness of the opinion our republicans have ever held and expressed, that the French revolution or the liberties of any people do not rest on the existence of any man, Principles and not men have ever been the objects of their attachment.

The papers under British influence, who have been endeavouring for some time past by every argument that sophistry could suggest to persuade the people that they have no right to express their sentiments on public measures, crowed inmoderately at the intelligence lately received of a temporary suspension of proceedings in the Jacobin Society of Paris. They artfully represented that intelligence as a death blow to popular societies in France and thence proceeded to shew the propriety of abolishing similar institutions here. The whole amount of the intelligence, however, (and the last accounts leave no further room for misrepresentation on this head) is that, at the critical period of Robespierre's fall the hall of the Jacobins was shut by the authority of the Convention; but two days after, we find an address to the Convention from that very society under a new name. We do not, and never did pretend to advocate the measures at different times taken in that society to counteract or promote by other weapons than those of argument the proceedings of the constituted authorities: such attempts we always considered as an abuse of the right of freely discussing the conduct of public men and the propriety of public measures: yet from the abuse of the thing we are not to argue against its use. But even if the ruling party in France should by a tyrannical stretch of power prevent the exercise of the important right of free enquiry, such conduct would change the question, and no man, in our enlightened republic would be swayed by the force of so pernicious an example and be tempted tamely to give up that right because it had been tyrannically wrested from his brethren the French.