The Virginia Gazette

SIR,

To Mr. ECONOMIST.

THAT your pen has been deeply dipped in the bitter gall of rancorous enmity, and is strongly tinctured with the virulence of party, is equally apparent with the disingenuous and uncandid address that you avow to the publick. It surely requires but a glance from the enlightened mind to discover this; you promise authentick facts; that your first is a base and artful suggestion to vilify the character of Mr. Deane, is a certain fact; that it was fabricated in the distempered brain of cankered malice is equally a fact; and that it contains innuendo, indefinite, inconclusive and absurd is also a fact. The only just inference to be drawn from it, is, that Mr. Deane may, or may not, have had a principal hand in the expenditure of about 150,000l. entrusted to him by Congress; do you infer that this money has been unfairly expended, or that Mr. Deane is unable to account for it? Do you know the secret services, as well as important publick concerns this money was to negotiate? If you would place the blackest construction, upon the best plea. Congress ordered Mr. Deane over to give an account of their interests, and the situation of their affairs in Europe; they did not call upon him, so account for the expenditures which he had made, nor did they by superseding him, give the least reason to suppose, that he was not to return. Could he divine that they meant to call upon him unprepared, to render accounts? And had he not by their order every reason to suppose it was intended for quite another purpose? Let your future information be better authenticated; let it be divested of partiality and calumny, and when you appear again, let it be in the garb of unprejudiced truth.

HONESTUS.