ontinue to corrupt the legislature; and was endeavouring to prostrate
the local authorities as a necessary step towards erecting that great
consolidated monarchy which he contemplated.

To support some of these charges, sentences and parts of sentences
were selected from his reports, which expressed the valuable purposes
to which a funded debt might be applied, and were alleged to affirm,
as an abstract principle, "that a public debt was a public blessing."
He was, it was added, the inveterate enemy of Mr. Jefferson, because,
in the republican principles of that gentleman, he perceived an
invincible obstacle to his views.

If the counter charges exhibited against the secretary of state were
less capable of alarming the fears of the public for liberty, and of
directing the resentments of the people against that officer as the
enemy of their rights, they were not less calculated to irritate his
personal friends, and to wound his own feelings.

The adversaries of this gentleman said, that he had been originally
hostile to the constitution of the United States, and adverse to its
adoption; and "that his avowed opinions tended to national disunion,
national insignificance, public disorder, and discredit." Under the
garb of democratic simplicity, and modest retiring philosophy, he
covered an inordinate ambition which grasped unceasingly at power, and
sought to gratify itself, by professions of excessive attachment to
liberty, and by traducing and lessening in the public esteem, every
man in whom he could discern a rival. To this aspiring temper they
ascribed, not only "those pestilent whispers which, clandestinely
circulating through the country, had, as far as was practicable,
contaminated some of its fairest and worthiest characters," but also
certain publications affecting the reputation of prominent individuals
whom he might consider as competitors with himself for the highest
office in the state. A letter written by Mr. Jefferson to a printer,
transmitting for publication the first part of "the rights of man,"
which letter was prefixed to the American edition of that pamphlet,
contained allusions to certain "political heresies" of the day, which
were understood to imply a serious censure on the opinions of the vice
president: and the great object of the national gazette, a paper known
to be edited by a clerk in the department of state, was "to calumniate
and blacken public characters, and, particularly, to destroy the