He adverted to a piece in Freneau's
paper of yesterday; he said he despised all their attacks on him
personally, but that there never had been an act of the government, not
meaning in the executive line only, but in any line, which that paper
had not abused. He had also marked the word republic thus X, where it
was applied to the French republic. (See the original paper.) He was
evidently sore and warm, and I took his intention to be, that I should
interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment
of translating clerk to my office. But I will not do it. His paper has
saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy, and has
been checked by no one means so powerfully as by that paper. It is well
and universally known, that it has been that paper which has checked the
career of the monocrats; and the President, not sensible of the designs
of the party, has not, with his usual good sense and _sang froid_,
looked on the efforts and effects of this free press, and seen that,
though some bad things have passed through it to the public, yet the
good have preponderated immensely.
June the 7th, 1793. Mr. Beckley, who has returned from New York within
a few days, tells me that, while he was there, Sir John Temple, Consul
General of the northern States for Great Britain showed him a letter
from Sir Gregory Page Turner, a member of parliament for a borough in
Yorkshire, who, he said, had been a member for twenty-five years, and
always confidential for the ministers in which he permitted him to read
particular passages of the following purport: that the government was
well apprized of the predominancy of the British interest in the United
States; that they considered Colonel Hamilton, Mr.
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