etter, "I see no harm in rendering their sanction
necessary, and not much harm in annihilating the whole treaty-making
power, except as to making peace. If you decide in favor of your right
to refuse your co-operation in any case of treaty, I wonder on what
occasion it is to be used, if not in one where the rights, the interest,
the honor, and faith of our nation are so grossly sacrificed; when a
faction has entered into a conspiracy with the enemies of their country,
to chain down the legislature at the feet of both; when the whole mass
of your constituents have condemned this work in the most unequivocal
manner, and are looking to you as their last hope to save them from the
effects of the avarice and corruption of the first agent, the
revolutionary machinations of others, and the incomprehensible
acquiescence of the only honest man [the president] who has assented to
it. I wish that his honesty and his political errors may not furnish a
second occasion to exclaim--'curse on his virtues, they have undone his
country.'"[98]

On the twenty-fourth of April, in a letter to his friend, Philip
Mazzei,[99] then in Florence--a letter which afterward drew down upon
the author the most severe comments--he said, "The aspect of our
politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that
noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us
triumphantly through the war, an Anglican monarchical and aristocratical
party has sprung up, whose avowed object is, to draw over us the
substance, as they have already done the form, of the British
government. The main body of our citizens, however, remain true to their
republican principles; the whole landed interest is republican, and so
is a great mass of talent. Against us are the executive; the judiciary;
two out of three branches of the legislature; all the officers of the
government; all who want to be officers; all timid men who prefer the
calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty; British merchants,
and Americans trading on British capital; speculators and holders in the
banks and public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of
corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well
as the sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever were
I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies; men
who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have
had their heads shorn by the ha