and, the chairman of the committee being opposed in sentiment
to the speaker, who was now placed in the chair, the majority was
precisely changed, and the words were reinstated. This victory,
however, if it may be termed one, was soon lost. A motion for
confining the censure to societies and combinations within the four
western counties of Pennsylvania and the adjacent country, succeeded
by the casting vote of the speaker, upon which, the friends of the
amendment gave it up, and the address was voted without expressing any
sentiment on the subject.

This triumph over the administration revived, for a moment, the
drooping energies of these pernicious societies. But it was only for a
moment. The agency ascribed to them by the opinion of the public, as
well as of the President, in producing an insurrection which was
generally execrated, had essentially affected them; and while
languishing under this wound, they received a deadly blow from a
quarter whence hostility was least expected.

The remnant of the French convention, rendered desperate by the
ferocious despotism of the Jacobins, and of the sanguinary tyrant who
had made himself their chief; perceiving that the number of victims
who were immolated as his caprice might suggest, instead of satiating,
could only stimulate his appetite for blood, had, at length, sought
for safety by boldly confronting danger; and, succeeding in a
desperate attempt to bring Robespierre to the guillotine, had
terminated his reign of terror. The colossean power of the clubs,
which had been abused to an excess that gives to faithful history the
appearance of fiction, fell with that of their favourite member, and
they sunk into long merited disgrace. The means by which their
political influence had been maintained were wrested from them; and,
in a short time, their meetings were prohibited. Not more certain is
it that the boldest streams must disappear, if the fountains which fed
them be emptied, than was the dissolution of the democratic societies
of America, when the Jacobin clubs were denounced by France. As if
their destinies depended on the same thread, the political death of
the former was the unerring signal for that of the latter; and their
expiring struggles, incapable of deferring their fate, only attested
the reluctance with which they surrendered their much abused power.

Notwithstanding the disagreement between the executive and one branch
of the legislature concerning self cre