Gazette Of The United States & Evening Advertiser

For the GAZETTE of the UNITED STATES.

To the SIEUR GENET, MINISTER of FRANCE.

WHENCE is it, Sir, that you alone, among the diplomatic characters in America, have been selected as the notorious object of public animadversion? Interesting to yourself, as it is to Americans, this question Mr. Genet, demands your attention.

In answer to this question, will you, in the spirit of calumny and self-admiration, presume to say, that the American press, devoted to the cause of despotism, persecutes you as the martyr of liberty? Instead of thus yielding to the seductions of passion, rather, Sir, for once, render homage to the simplicity of truth, and reflect whether a more correct answer may not be given! Shall I mention one for your consideration? Yet deem it not singular, that a person unpractised in the insidiousness of Courts, unversed in the sophistry of St. Omer's, and unambitious of rivaling you in artifice, should give an answer very different from yourself, an answer which is plain, simple, palpable. You alone, among the diplomatic characters in America, have notoriously offended against diplomatic propriety.

Delegated, as French missionary, to the constituted government of the American Republic, your mission, as relative to this government, was either a mission of peace, or a mission of perfidy. What then has been your conduct, as relative to the American government? Have not your proceedings, instead of evincing a Minister of peace, branded you as the Apostle of discord? And was such the purpose of the nation whom you claim to represent? No! Sir, however zealous you may be to calumniate the French nation by confounding them with yourself, we acquit them of the charge: Never can we believe that the republicans of France would approve a mission of perfidy. To do justice to the French people, we must then be careful to discriminate between them, and yourself. And, making this discrimination, we are constrained to regard some of your proceedings, Sir, as meriting no light reprehension.

Could we totally abstract your diplomatic character from your proceedings, while you hold and abuse that character, we might regard your language as but the intemperate effusions of a self-admiring declaimer: And, in this abstracted view, the combination of fatuity and vanity, being regarded as innocuous, might afford matter of transient mirth. But when, in abusing your diplomatic trust, you claim that your language should be respected as the voice of France, the subject instantly assumes a very different aspect; and your published declarations, whether resulting from ignorance, vanity, fanaticism, or perfidy, become seriously interesting to the friends of true republicanism: For, whether you betray the republican cause; from ignorance, vanity, fanaticism, or perfidy, whether you betray it from want of wisdom, or from want of honesty, still, Sir, you injure the cause which you ought to benefit, and which, notwithstanding its being profaned by your professions of devotion, is precious and sacred to Americans.

"That you are not destitute of talent," has been already conceded in the address which I presented to you, through the Gazette, in consequence of the letter, of the 13th of August, which you wrote for the press, and sent to the President. My generosity, as one of the people, having made you this concession while there appeared some room for hoping that you would listen to the voice of instruction and reform, although your own conduct has since reduced you, in point of character, to be but a mendicant pensioner on the charity of public opinion, yet, while I scorn to despoil the beggar, I scorn to revoke my generous concession. But lest, from your proneness to eulogize yourself, you should abuse this concession to your own injury, let me remind you, that, in kind, as well as in degree, talents are various. And, as "you are not destitute of talent," so neither was an ancient noted incendiary, one trait of whose character seems not altogether inapplicable to yourself :-"Satis eloquentiae, sapientiae parum."

Considering that a person in your station ought not to be so ignorant of classic literature as you profess to be of some of the most celebrated works on national law, although I do not question your professed ignorance, I now credit you as having the ability to understand a short sentence from Sallust: I, accordingly, omit giving you a version of this which I have just cited. And, leaving it to your own moments of temperate reflection, if ever you have any, I observe, that the character at large may be worth your attention. You may find it delineated by Sallust, in his history of the Catalinarian war. And, while you are meditating on this subject, let me urge you to reflect, that, however much or however long you may have abused our patience, yet the incendiary, who makes professions of virtue in the cause of vice, and boasts of patriotism for the purposes of sedition, will not eventually find more support in America than your prototype found in Rome.

The insidiousness of your professions, the illegitimacy of your doctrines, the audacity of your pretensions, have conspired to provoke and justify typographical strictures. Appearing before the American public in the novel and amphibious character of typographical Minister, your claims to public animadversion are various, urgent, and unrivalled. Whether we contemplate you as the soi-disant oracle of national law, as the expositor of the American Constitution, as the exotic guardian of the sovereign people of the United States, as the public accuser of their constituted authorities; or whether we contemplate you as a diplomatic Proteus transforming yourself into a multiplicity of shapes, and adopting such various forms as you may think adapted to aid your machinations—whether you adopt the form of epistolary correspondence, diplomatic communication, consular protestation, circular address to American committees of beneficence, circular instructions to French consuls, or any other form which anarchial zeal may suggest; still, Sir, we find no cause to deny you the character of which you seem so ambitious, the character of an Apostle of Discord.

You may affect a tremulous concern for the President, and, with the modesty peculiar to yourself, profess to the public, as in your letter to Governor Moultrie; your "grief at seeing General Washington, that celebrated hero of liberty, accessible to men whose schemes could only darken his glory." But in vain may you expect that such arts will delude the informed Americans. The weeping of the insidious crocodiles deludes none but the ignorant.

If he has become the object of your pity, General Washington is fallen indeed. Are you so vain, Sir, as to imagine, that his, or his country's glory depends on you? Learn then to know thyself; and be assured, that it is not the breath of Genet, but the energy of truth, which swells the trumpet of fame.

After considering, that, in your letter of the 27th of October to the Secretary of State, you have charged President Washington with usurping power which the constitution does not allow him; when we further observe, that, through your subaltern Dannery you profess, to the Executive of Massachusetts, an anxious sensibility lest hostilities should interrupt "the ever-dear fraternity between " two nations yet sisters," and that you also at the same time exhibit a manifesto against our National Executive; the language of such communications excites, in the American mind, at once, contempt and indignation.

Are we to be duped, or terrified, from the maintenance of our own internal sovereignty, by the insidious professions, or menaces of a diplomatic or consular dictator? Will you, Sir, say, that there is danger of hostilities between France and America? If so, whence does this danger arise? Whence, but from functionaries who, intrusted with affairs of France, abuse the confidence of an high-spirited people?— Whence, but from such persons as yourself?

Mr. Genet! will you, while Minister of France, pretend to be ignorant, that your Masters have represented federalism as the evil genius of anarchy, of rebellion of royalism, as a monster threatening destruction to the unity and indivisibility of the Republic? Did you then, in ordering Dannery to denounce the President, propose to excite in America the very spirit which has been excited at Marseilles, at Lyons, at Toulon? Speak, Sir! what was your purpose in that insidious denunciation? What, but to divide and command the American People? Accordingly, the moment of our national division, would have been the moment of your congratulating yourself as Dictator over America.

Not to particularize all the insidious communications which you have been eager to publish, and without now remarking on the illegality of the doctrines which they contain, the publications already noticed, especially those relating to the affair of Duplaine, sufficiently brand you as the Apostle of Discord. And, on reviewing the conduct of our public functionaries, and considering your various insinuations and direct charges against them, the mind is impressed with one concluding sentiment.

To be the FIRST of WARRIORS, and yet to be accused for being the friend of PEACE, is the peculiar honor of Washington; an honor worthy the FIRST FUNCTIONARY OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC IN THE UNIVERSE. For manifesting himself to be the vigilant friend of peace, as well as the firm asserter of our national sovereignty, he is honored by the approving voice of his country, and has shared, with other officers of our government, in your calumnies, and in your honorable hatred.

ALFRED.