Jenks's Portland Gazette

Character of a Jacobin!
FROM MR. PAINE'S ORATION

A PURE, unmixed Jacobin, of the Secondary order, is an enemy to all governments under which he holds no office. Be it a republic, it is venal; an aristocracy, it is feudal; a monarchy, it is despotic. In short, he barks for a pension, and raves at his obscurity. Revere the scene--present him a piece of parchment with the President's Seal appendant, and you will see
"That lowliness is young Ambition's ladder.
Whereto the climber upwards turns his face,
But when he once attains the topmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend."
Invest a Jacobin (of this minor species) in the enviable dignities of a Federal Commission, and his former virulence will be instantly mollified to the most submissive servility. He will attack his old companions in iniquity, and beat them at their own weapons; he will write federal libels on the public censor and break the windows of the Chronicle Office! From a most ferocious he is transformed to a most tractable animal; and from a town-meeting caviler against priests and placemen, he becomes the very scavenger of administration!--Such is the legitimate plebeian democrat;--a mere poisonous fungus, produced by the effervescence of the times.
"like the green mantle on a standing pool," by the putrid exhalations of a summer's sun. But a Jacobin of Weishaupt's school never changes his principles: honors and promotions never alter a tittle of his creed; and he aspires to office only for the purpose of embezzling the revenues & prostrating the happiness of his country. A character so inveterately perverse, has no capacity to appreciate the real blessings of religion, government or liberty. His whole science is directed to unhinge society. his whole ambition to plunder it. He is too ravenous to be content with a system of order himself, and too selfish to permit its enjoyment by others. Like a HOG in A FLOWER GARDEN, he sets no value on the variegated foliage he destroys, and seems only desirous to root out every twig of vegetation that can satiate his voracity. To do justice to his subject, the style of a writer must conform to it. Were a poet to conjure down every planet and constellation that "frets with gold the vaulted roof of heaven," or to pilfer every nosegay from the bosom of Flora, he would not find in the whole motley mass of his plunder, a fit simile for a jacobin! He must descend to the most groveling and churlish of the brute creation. The great Burke himself, in some of his most celebrated speeches in parliament, and particularly in his "Letter to the Duke of Bedford," was compelled to commit this outrage on the delicate taste of a critical public!