I could mean no such thing, that this declaration seems hardly necessary; but, as my poor old grandmother used to say, “A burnt child dreads the fire,” and after the unrelenting severities of misconception and misconstruction, that a humane and commiserating public have so often seen me endure, they will think it very natural for me to fear, that what I really intended as a compliment, would, if left unexplained, be tortured into insult and abuse, if not into the horrid crime of lèze-republicanism, at the very idea of which my hair stands on end, and my heart dies within me.
“But,” cry the democrats, “in what sense, then, do you apply the word Blunderbuss? Come, come, Mr. Peter, none of your shuffling.”—Silence, you yelping devils; go, growl in your dark kennel; slink into your straw, and leave me to my reader: I’ll warrant I explain myself to his satisfaction.
Writings of a hostile nature are often metaphorically expressed, in proportion to the noise they make, by different instruments that act by explosion. Thus it is, for instance, that an impotent lampoon is called a Popgun; and that a biting paragraph or epigram, confined to a small circle, is termed a squib; and thus it is, that, rising in due progression, the collection of Citizen Adet’s Notes and Cockade Proclamation is denominated a Blunderbuss, a species of fire-arms that exceeds all others, manageable by a single hand, in the noise of its discharge.
If we pursue the metaphor, we shall find the application still more strikingly happy. The first Note is a kind of preparative for the Cockade Proclamation, and this latter adjusts matters for the grand explosion; or, in the military style,—
Make Ready!
Present!
Fire!
To be sure we are not dead, but this circumstance, instead of mutilating my metaphor, renders it complete; for of all the long list of fire-arms, none is so difficult to adjust, or makes so much noise and smoke, with so little execution, as a Blunderbuss.
This is the first time, I believe, that a Preface ever turned its eyes backwards, and talked about the title till there was no room left to say a word about the book. Indeed the book stands in little need of commendation, or of any thing else, except what I am determined shortly to bestow on it, in a manner worthy of its merits.
In the succeeding number, he answered the charges which it contains against the President and his Government. The paper contains the substance of Adet’s charges, as well as the answer, so that we need not insert the official notes of the French Minister. As this paper closes the affair of the British Treaty, we have taken it a little out of its order in the original work, and shall give in our next number a paper written in answer to attacks on Mr. Cobbett, which, strictly following chronological order, should have come in before this one. The “Remarks” contain one argument which we think will of itself repay the reader; we mean that on the doctrine of allegiance, which is so correctly stated that it would do credit to the soundest lawyer or statesman, as is fully verified by the fact, that numerous decisions have been made by the courts of law in England and America since it was written, all of which agree in the principles here laid down. It is put to the reader in so plain, so forcible, and so eloquent a manner, that, if nothing more, it is a model of good writing, and therefore deserves to be preserved.
To Correspondents.—As nothing is more gratifying than the applause, or profitable than the admonition, of good men, I have reason to congratulate myself on an abundance of both: but as applause ought never to be purchased with money, and as admonition is a commodity that every one is ready to bestow gratis, I must request that future communications of this kind may come to me post free.—I also beg leave to hint to those who give me advice, which they wish I should follow, not to do it in too dictatorial a style; for, if I have any good qualities, docility, I am afraid, is not to be numbered amongst them.
The moment the Gallic usurpers had murdered their sovereign, and, from the vilest walks in life, mounted into his seat, they assumed the tone of masters to the Government of the United States. Their style has softened, it is true; but the general tenor of it has regularly approached towards that loftiest note, that ne plus ultra of insolence, which it attained in Citizen Adet’s last communications.
In offering my sentiments on these arrogant effusions of upstart tyranny, I feel an unusual degree of diffidence: a diffidence that does not arise from any fear I entertain of the citizen or his factious adherents, or even of the “terrible nation,” to use his own words, of which he was lately the worthy representative, but from a consciousness of my inability to do justice to the subject. The keenest satire, were I master of it, would fall blunted from such hardened impudence, such pure unadulterated brass as it would here have to encounter. Terms of reproach are not yet invented, capable of expressing the resentment that every man, who has the least respect for the Government, ought to feel on this occasion.
Thus voluntarily to interfere in a correspondence between a foreign minister and the officers of state, might, under other circumstances, appear rather a bold intrusion; but, the citizen’s having communicated his papers to the people, at the same time, if not before, they reached the Secretary of State, happily precludes the necessity of an apology.
The notes on which I am about to remark, to which, collected together, I affixed the title of Diplomatic Blunderbuss, are intended chiefly to notify to the people of America, that the French rulers are angry with the Federal Government, and that, in consequence of this anger, they have ordered citizen Adet to suspend his functions as minister, till the Government shall alter its conduct, or, in the pedagogue style, mend its manners.
In the 44th page of the Blunderbuss, the citizen makes a recapitulation of the offences that have brought on us this dreadful chastisement, this political excommunication; and it will not appear a little surprising, that some of them have existed ever since the birth of the French Republic, notwithstanding the love and esteem this outlandish lady has ever expressed towards her sister America.
These offences, amounting to seven in number, are as follows:
1. The Federal Government put in question, whether it should execute the treaties, or receive the agents of the rebel and proscribed princes.
2. It made a proclamation of insidious neutrality.
3. By its chicaneries, it abandoned French privateers to its courts of justice.
4. It eluded the amicable mediation of the French Republic for breaking the chains of the American citizens in Algiers.
5. It allowed the French colonies to be declared in a state of blockade, and allowed the citizens of America to be interdicted the right of trading to them.
6. It eluded all the advances made by the French Republic for renewing the treaties of commerce upon a more favourable footing to both nations.
7. It anticipated Great Britain, by soliciting a treaty, in which treaty it prostituted its neutrality; it sacrificed France to her enemies, or rather, looking upon her as obliterated from the chart [map] of the world, it forgot the services she had rendered it, and threw aside the duty of gratitude, as if ingratitude was a governmental duty.
These are the heinous crimes of which the Federal Government stands charged by the sultans of France. Let us now, if they will permit us, examine these crimes, one by one, and see whether the President, and Messrs. Hamilton, Knox, Jay, Pickering and Walcot, really deserve to be guillotined, or not.
“1. The Federal Government put in question, whether it should execute the treaties, or receive the agents of the rebel and proscribed princes.”
The King of France was murdered on the 21st of January, 1793. Information of this event could not be received here much before the 18th
