Gazette Of The United States

HARTFORD, Jan. 10.

Some of the public creditors in Pennsylvania, have presented Congress with a petition, the stile of which, in imitation of Gibbon, is most sublimely and elegantly obscure, but the design of which is to induce Congress to alter the funding system and give six per cent. interest on the whole public debt at once. They call themselves the patriotic victims of the war; when in truth three fourths of them are speculators, who have purchased most of the public paper for less than half its value.

They begin their tedious address with charging the Secretary of the Treasury with inconsistency, in recognizing the justice of their claims in the utmost latitude, in the beginning of his report, and then recommending a plan of funding the debt at less than was originally promised. They proceed to charge Congress with having lost the disposition to do justice, altho they had acquired the power. After some common place remarks on the moral and political obligation of contracts and the importance of public credit, they enumerate the many promises made to the creditors by Congress under the confederation, and then charge the present legislature of the Union, with having clandestinely obtained an unreasonable concession from the creditors, and with having infringed the original contract and destroyed its principles. They charge the Congress indirectly with being callous to their merits and sufferings, and tarnishing the glories of America with broken contracts and violated faith. They declare the old Congress to have been a wise and virtuous body, who practised right, as far as they were able; but the present act for making provision for the public debt, they say, is an insult to the public faith, a striking contrast to the illustrious example of the first Congress, and a dangerous infraction of the fundamental laws of justice.

In short, the whole petition is but a round about way of telling Congress they are a set of Scoundrels.