Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

By this Day's Mail.

SALEM, May 7.

COMMUNICATION.

Words are eternally leading us astray, but deeds should fix our judgments, and actuate decision; they are the real monitors that would show us the friendship, or enmity of a foreign nation. For a long time we were loth to doubt of French friendship, tho' on their side supported only by an ardency of words; we however considered them as struggling for their liberties, and our hearts rejoiced in their successes. But when they insulted our government, so gloriously established upon the basis of rational liberty, we discovered the madness of their ambition, and the duplicity of their disposition. It was then that the guardian genius of American liberty penetrated their disguise, and at length tore off the veil, and pointed to French liberty as an ambitious hypocrite! France assumed the mask to seduce, and the word to destroy! Her words are peace, while she delights in blood! Her apparent generous proclamations are but a cover to unlimited plunder! Look at the miserable countries that have been deceived by her verbose professions, and are now suffering the horrors of her devastating tyranny, and you will find this a faint sketch of her horrible features. Is this the benign plant of freedom that Jacobins would transfer to the American soil! Passing over the disappointed and the wicked, we have many among us, men of small talents, that favour the views of France: they examine but the outside of things, and are constantly deceiving themselves: the mischief would be less, if they did not deceive others who have not time to investigate. These Fanatics, when they preach up liberty, are as much deceived as to its real genius, as were the people of Paris, when they worshiped courtezan for goddesses of reason. Wise in their own conceit, they with a fascinating sound work upon ignorance, and fit it for impostors! Men of the same stamp in Switzerland were the whetstones that sharpened the tools of France; and at length the fair fabrick of Helvetian Liberty, which had afforded to society an agreeable shelter, where it had given birth to virtue, ingenuity and its industry, was hewed in pieces, and the French Tree planted upon its ruins—soon will it poison their manners, and corrupt all the sources of national happiness! This will most assuredly be our own fate, though we are at the distance of a thousand leagues from the French Directory, unless we place the utmost confidence in our own government, whose measures have been founded in wisdom, and justified by the eloquence & arguments of genuine patriotism; but we must recollect, that it has not only to watch an external enemy, but to protect itself against traitors that infest the bosom of our country, who assume every form and guise to debilitate its strength. Much then is expected, from the virtue and opinions of the American people, to supply the energies that government is without; and it is their duty, by the Federalism of their words and actions, to annihilate the Pseudo Politicians who would bring divisions into the public councils.

X.