National Gazette

SENTIMENTS of a REPUBLICAN.

A CERTAIN prince once asked one of his ministers, how he should counteract the ideas of liberty which he had observed to prevail among his subjects in certain parts of his dominions. Force them, (said the minister) to rebel, and thus punish them by confiscating the very means they will have of supporting a struggle for liberty. The advice was followed, and with the wished for success. Lewis XIVth asked Cardinal Richlieu, how he should annihilate the remains of liberty which still existed in the kingdom of France. 'Fill your kingdom (said the Cardinal) with places of public amusement, and by these means divert the people from thinking or talking upon the affairs of government.' The efficacy of this measure in completing the despotism of the late French government, is too well known to be mentioned.

From the present signs of the declining state of liberty in our country, it would seem as if some demon, unfriendly to human happiness, had whispered in the ears of the first Congress that assembled under the present government, that the most speedy and effectual method of destroying the liberties of the United States, was to establish and perpetuate among them a national debt.

Innumerable have been the evils introduced by the funded debt of the United States. But the most alarming one is, it has produced so much inequality in point of property among our citizens, as to endanger the safety of our government.

The most barefaced efforts have been made to substitute, in the room of our equal republic, a baneful monarchy in our country; and it is too evident these efforts originate with those states, and with those individuals, who are most interested in the funding system. Examine the newspapers and the journals of Congress, and you will find that the propositions for titles, for an equestrian statue, for keeping birth days, and for emitting royal coin, all come from those two quarters. The propositions are as degrading to the President of the United States as they are dangerous and insulting to the people, for they are calculated to reduce him to a level with the titled and royal banditti of Europe, who govern their subjects by fraud or violence.

If our wealthy speculators, in and out of Congress, cannot enjoy their immense estates, without creating among us a power that shall hereafter ennoble them, let them transport themselves across the ocean and bask in the splendor of courts, birth-day assemblies, and royal pictures and statues in some old and corrupted country.

Let the United States disgorge such beasts of plunder and prey; and let them do more, let them immediately devise ways and means for the payment of every farthing of the national debt. It is a millstone about the neck of our country. It is even worse than a calamity that induces suffocation and death. It is a monster, from whose foetid bowels proceed monarchy, aristocracy, and slavery.