Alexandria Gazette & Daily Advertiser

ALEXANDRIA:
MONDAY MORNING, AUGUST 17

Should the nations of Europe be cruel and rash enough to shape their opinions of the people of the United States by the samples held forth to them in our public prints, they must soon entertain a very humiliating conception of our moral and political character. The friends of freedom in particular, who are more thickly set in that quarter of the world than our liberty brawlers by trade, or the knaves who employ them, or the fools who are duped by them, would have us to believe, will regard with astonishment and concern the departure, they will naturally enough conclude us to be guilty of, from all the salutary principles for which our early course obtained us credit; and they will be the more disappointed and astonished, because they had confidently held up the United States as an evidence of the truth of their arguments, in opposition to those, who by inferences deduced from the errors and abuses of the ancient democracies, and above all by those drawn from the mischievous effects of democracy in France, have long maintained that republics are vicious, and fraught with the most pernicious effects to society—pernicious to national character, subversive of social security and happiness, and contaminating to public and private morality.

The enemies of republicanism will now remind them of the sanguine hopes entertained, and bold promises made on behalf of that species of government, as it was then in process experimental, and would soon be established, by proof practical in the new world. "When we insisted, (they will say) that as a republic America would be ambitious, turbulent, rapacious and unjust to other nations, as republics ever have been—that at home it would be individually intolerant, tyrannical, selfish and morose (that is to say that those would be the feelings and habits of the majority of the individuals who should compose it, or in other words be the ton and fashion of the population) that mutual love and mutual benevolence, and all those refined sentiments which distinguish man from brutes, in an ascending scale of melioration—the more noble from the gross, and by insensible gradations towards a state of spiritualized excellence, at length elevates men to a condition next to angels, would be extinguished in a swinish indulgence of the worst human infirmities—that dishonesty, not concealed, but open, bold, boastful, and proud of its deformity, would arise out of that indulgence—that, as usual, war would follow, and an unappeasable itch for war, as the instrument of wrong, become the appetite of the more active and enterprising of our population, to the ruin of domestic morals, the disturbance of the laws of vicinage, and the misery and annoyance of foreign nations; you still said that we were mistaken, that we were prejudiced, that we saw every thing belonging to the subject with a jaundiced eye—and that the constant vigilance and jealous superintendence of the people, rendered effective in its operation by the powerful agency of that all-powerful instrument a pure and free press, would render ambition impotent, throw violation of national rights entirely out of their system, and give that republic for ages to the undisturbed enjoyment of peace—and in short, that it would be the opening of a new and a short road to the millennium.—But now look to the public journals of that republic and be convinced of your fond and foolish error.

"Behold a nation to the government of which tyranny is unknown, and which yet is subject to the scourges of thousands of mean and unprincipled tyrants, the bottom dregs of society!—Behold a press intended by the beneficent authors of that independence of theirs, (the establishment of which had our heartfelt prayers and good wishes) perverted into a mighty engine of faction—a battering ram for the demolition of peace and order—a Pasquin's mutilated image, where every filthy lampoon, every malignant libel is stuck up for the amusement of the rabble—where the rights of the citizen are trampled under foot, the feelings of innocent and even unoffending innocence are sacrificed to personal venom or political fraud—where even the most virtuous actions of a virtuous and magnanimous government are traduced and endeavored to be thwarted and contravened, national robbery recommended, and the conduct of that government held up to odium and suspicion, and its motives and purposes impeached and insulted, because it endeavors to rescue the nation from the indelible stain of committing an outrage on a neighboring nation, that would include in its omnivorous injustice and profligacy, every constituent of baseness, cowardice, violence and fraud."

Under the pressure of circumstances of necessity which must be allowed to justify the aggression, the cabinet of the United States march an army into the Spanish territories in Florida, avowing that it is their determination to withdraw that army as soon as the object for which it was introduced there, and in which nothing hostile to Spain was involved, should be completely effected. Few are so ignorant of the political composition of our country as not to know that there exists in it a strong faction of whose views, objects and principles, it may be enough to say that they resemble those of that particular breed, which in the French menagerie of wild animals went by the name of jacobin—a breed which can be kept from disturbing the harmony of society wherever they can find their way only by direct coercion, as was done by Bonaparte, or by clearing away all pretext for turbulence. The conduct of our administration, it was hoped by some, had accomplished the latter by its moderation, justice and wisdom: but hoped in vain—and sure those who knew the nature of that kind of political sect ought not to have overlooked the evident truth, that in dealing where men of such principles are active, government will ever be reduced to the very mortifying alternative of abstaining from all just and honorable acts, or incurring their hatred and opposition. The plan upon which Mr. Monroe has conducted the national affairs, therefore, must confer upon him an indefeasible title to their resentment: and the business of Florida was exactly calculated to bring it to an intelligible issue.