The Kentucky Gazette

The legislature of Virginia, with their wonted magnanimity and that liberality so accordant with sound principles and virtuous views, have taken up the communications of the several states hostile to them on the alien and sedition laws; and in an able, dispassionate, and minute report, have discussed the objections to their opinions. The report consists of 57 pages octavo, close printing. From the 57th page, we extract the following luminous and incontrovertible arguments:

We commenced the publication of the report in our paper No. 699, without knowing its extent ; as the following arguments forms a summary of the whole, we shall decline the continuation as we flatter ourselves that this will be more acceptable to our readers, than so voluminous a publication,

"1. The constitution supposes that the president, the congress, and each of its houses, may not discharge their trusts, either from defect of judgement, or other causes. Hence, they are all made responsible to their constituents at the returning periods of election, and the president, who is singly entrusted with very great powers, is, as a further guard, subjected to an intermediate impeachment.

2. Should it happen, as the constitution supposes it may happen, that either of these branches of the government, may not have duly discharged its trust it is natural and proper, that according to the cause and degree of their faults, they should be brought into contempt or disrepute, and incur the hatred of the people.

3. Whether it has, in any case happened, that the proceedings of either, or all of those branches, evinces such a violation of their duty as to justify a contempt, a disrepute, or hatred among the people, can only be determined by a free examination thereof and a free communication among the people thereon.

4. Whenever it may have actually happened, that proceedings of this sort are chargeable on all or either of the branches of the government, it is the duty as well as right of intelligent and faithful citizens to discuss and promulge them freely, as well to control them by the censorship of the public opinions, as to promote a remedy according to the rules of the constitution. And it cannot be avoided, that those who apply the remedy must feel, in some degree, a contempt or hatred against the transgressing party.

5. As the act was passed in July 1798, and it is to be in force until March 3, 1801, it was of course, that during its continuance two elections of the entire house of representatives, an election of two thirds of the senate, and an election of a president, were to take place.

6. That consequently, during all these elections, intended by the constitution to preserve the purity, or to purge the faults of the administration, the great remedial rights of the people were to be exercised, and the responsibility of their public agents to be screened, under the penalties of this act.

May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this, ought not to produce great and universal alarm ? whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people, which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights ? and whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigour, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it."