Country? If these
arguments are stated beforehand they will prevent the Committees going
into the subject of French Citizenship. They must be ashamed of it.
But after all the case comes to this, that this French Citizenship
appertains no longer to me because the Convention, as I have already
said, have swept it away by declaring me to be foreigner, and it is not
in the power of the Committees to reverse it. But if I am to be citizen
and foreigner, and citizen again, just when and how and for any purpose
they please, they take the Government of America into their own hands
and make her only a Cypher in their system.

Though these ideas have been long with me they have been more
particularly matured by reading your last Communication, and I have
many reasons to wish you had opened that Communication sooner. I am best
acquainted with the persons you have to deal with and the circumstances
of my own case. If you chuse to adopt the letter as it is, I send you a
translation for the sake of expediting the business. I have endeavoured
to conceive your own manner of expression as well as I could, and the
civility of language you would use, but the matter of the letter is
essential to me.

If you chuse to confer with some of the members of the Committee at
your own house on the subject of the letter it may render the sending it
unnecessary; but in either case I must request and press you not to give
away to evasion and delay, and that you will fix positively with them
that they shall give you an answer in three or four days whether they
will liberate me on the representation you have made in the letter, or
whether you must be forced to go further into the subject. The state of
my health will not admit of delay, and besides the tortured state of
my mind wears me down. If they talk of bringing me to trial (and I well
know there is no accusation against me and that they can bring none)
I certainly summons you as an Evidence to my Character. This you may
mention to them either as what I intend to do or what you intend to do
voluntarily for me.

I am anxious that you undertake this business without losing time,
because if I am not liberated in the course of this decade, I intend, if
in case the seventy-one detained deputies are liberated, to follow the
same track that they have done, and publish my own case myself.(1)
I cannot rest any longer in this state of miserable suspense, be the
consequences what they may.

Thomas Paine.