The Recorder

To MR. JOHN CLOPTON,
Member of Congress.
No. XI.

SIR,

TEN letters have been published in this paper addressed to you, and one to the public, concerning you, which appeared during the session of Congress. These letters contained a good deal of plain dealing and some severity. It was expected by many people, though I confess, not by me, that you would have answered them. I knew, as well as you, that there was little room for an answer; and common sense, or rather self-preservation would adopt the submissive and obedient system which you appear to have used.

It was expected by me, that your circular letter, which would appear about near end of the late session, would be written with more caution, that you would, in this way, show your repentance for the deceptious tendencies of all your former letters. The circular has appeared. One is now before me; and you have pursued the same course. You have published a whole paragraph of untruth. When I am assailing your political character, which only I have heretofore attacked, it is not necessary to say any thing concerning the immorality of such conduct, nor will it avail you, if your partisans should say that it has proceeded from a mistake. As a politician, and as a writer upon political questions, a man ought to have a sufficient capacity for judging. To the community it is the same, whether an injury proceeds from weakness, or from wickedness, from incapacity, or injustice.

The paragraph to which I allude, is as follows:

"The financial department presents a theme for our admiration. The amount of duties arising from imports and tonnage exhibits a view of the commerce of the United States, scarcely less astonishing, than it is pleasing, to observe its great extent. Here our attention is drawn to that source of revenue, to mark its flourishing state and its progressive increase. Great as it has been at former periods, it is found to be greater at the present. It affords a fund so large that the government has been thereby enabled, in the course of the last year, to discharge considerably more than five million of dollars of the principal of the public debt; to defray all its current expenses, and to meet all its exigencies; yet leaving in the treasury between four and five millions of dollars, for a further application to those objects. These salutary effects have been produced without internal taxes of any kinds and furnish incontestible evidence that the objection, urged by a part of the community against the repeal of those taxes at the last session, proceeded from groundless apprehensions, and was the anticipation of a censure now shown to be unmerited. From the revenue, therefore, to safely be counted upon, as a permanent resource from our commerce, aided by a perseverance in those maxims of economy, and frugal spirit of frugality, which may justly be said to characterize the administration of the government, We look, with confidence to the fair prospect of a complete extinguishment of the public debt at a period not far distant, should the pacific system pursued by the government meet with no interruption. This is a circumstance greatly to be celebrated- highly important to the comprehension of national objects."

Although when your former circular letter was published, you might not have foreseen the repeal of the taxes concerning the rum excise, or induced your friend to sell the Bank stock, and that he would be so much oppressed by their finances as to make a sacrifice of 120,000 dollars in the sale, yet this was not the case when you wrote the letter which is now before me. The sale of the bank stock, and the sale of land amounted to about two millions of dollars, to get which, 220,000 were lost. How, then, have you the effrontery to say to your constituents, that our revenues had increased, so as to afford a fund so large, that the government has been thereby enabled, in the course of the last year to discharge considerably more than five million of dollars of the principal of the public debt? What right had you to withhold from them, the important information that the bank stock had been sacrificed and was gone forever? or that but a small part was received from the sale of land: or that a great deal of the money concerning which you boast, has been received from those very taxes which have been repealed? or, that you with other members of your own tenets, have given two millions of dollars to the president, to be disposed of as he pleases? is this the spirit of frugality and economy of which you prate so much?

I two thousand two hundred and twenty shares in the bank of the United States which produced an annual revenue of about seventy thousand dollars have been sacrificed for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars loss, for the purpose of getting a large sum of money in the treasury, and then Congress, (I mean Mr. Clopton, and other economizers like him,) have passed a resolution that the president should dispose of two millions of those dollars as he pleases. This is a good way to pay the public debt! This is pretty economy! This is great frugality! It is like the prudence of a spendthrift, who sells his estate to discharge his gambling debts, and for the purpose of having a little ready money takes three fourths of its value.

As to the rest of your letter, it is filled with common place remarks which have been written, published, and repeated in ten thousand times ten thousand ways, long before you were born, and you might as well, perhaps better, have copied a few pages from the whole Duty of Man, as a circular letter; all that you can pretend to say, which can apply to your official character, is deceptious, and has been just now exposed, the last sentence excepted. In that you say, that you are willing to accept again the honor of being elected by the district as a member of Congress." In this you are intelligible, and provided you succeed in that it is most likely, that your next letter will embrace the sermon which Christ preached on the mount, the ten commandments; or something else which was very well known before.

FEDERALIST.