rders to suspend his ministerial
functions, and to return home. "But the cause," he added, "which had so
long restrained the just resentment of the executive directory from
bursting forth, now tempered its effects. The name of America,
notwithstanding the wrongs of its government, still excited sweet
emotions in the hearts of Frenchmen; and the executive directory wished
not to break with a people whom they loved to salute with the
appellation of a friend." Therefore, the suspension of his functions was
not to be regarded as a rupture between France and the United States,
but as a mark of just discontent, which was to last until the government
of the United States "returned to sentiments and to measures more
conformable to the interests of the alliance, and to the sworn
friendship between the two nations."

This extraordinary letter closed with the following peroration, intended
to stimulate the anti-British feeling among the Americans, and to
influence the action of the electoral college in their choice of
chief-magistrate of the republic:--

"Alas! time has not yet demolished the fortifications with which
the English roughened this country, nor those the Americans raised
for their defence; their half-rounded summits still appear in every
quarter, amid plains, on the tops of mountains. The traveller need
not search for the ditch which served to encompass them; it is
still open under his feet. Scattered ruins of houses laid waste,
which the fire had partly respected, in order to leave monuments
of British fury, are still to be found. Men still exist who can
say, 'Here a ferocious Englishman slaughtered my mother; there my
wife tore her bleeding daughter from the hands of an unbridled
Englishman!' Alas! the soldiers who fell under the sword of the
Britons are not yet reduced to dust; the laborer, in turning up his
fields, still draws from the bosom of the earth their whitened
bones, while the ploughman, with tears of tenderness and gratitude,
still recollects that his fields, now covered with rich harvests,
have been moistened with French blood; while everything around the
inhabitants of this country animates them to speak of the tyranny
of Great Britain, and of the generosity of Frenchmen; when England
had declared a war of death, to revenge herself on France for
having consecrated with her blood the independence of the