Alexandria Advertiser And Commercial Intelligencer

"A public debt is a public curse"—say the Jacobins: yet an extra session of Congress is called to add fifteen millions of dollars to that public debt: which will increase it to upwards of one hundred millions of dollars. And for what is this increase? For the jurisdiction of a region of land covered with Indians.: at the time too when the United States have on hand, which they cannot sell no less than two hundred and thirty five millions of acres—enough to form ten States as large as Massachusetts; and a jurisdiction too, which the ceders, at the time of cession, had no more physical power to convey, than the devil had the land he offered to give the Saviour of the world. New Orleans, we admit, would have been worth part of the money, were it not that we had just as good right to use that island for all the purposes for which it can be useful to us, before, as since the cession. In 1795, this right was guaranteed to the United States by a solemn treaty: or the assignment of an equivalent establishment on another part of the banks of the Mississippi: New Orleans, therefore, is out of the question. The truth is,—France wanted money; and she has long been in the habit of laying nations under tribute by force or fraud. During the last war, finding she could not intimidate nor cajole the American Administrations, she plundered the citizens of the United States of near twenty millions of dollars. In this war, she plays the game of cajole with better success, and under the pretence of ceding a tract of wild land, replenishes her almost exhausted coffers with fifteen millions of dollars! This is a "ruse de cabinet" with a vengeance; and, however, the clawbacks of the present administration may pretend to the contrary, the world will see the slimness of the pretence, and expostulate accordingly.

[Boston Centinel.]