3682. HARTFORD CONVENTION, Crime of.—
When England took alarm lest
France, become republican, should recover
energies dangerous to her, she employed emissaries
with means to engage incendiaries and
anarchists in the disorganization of all government
here. These, assuming exaggerated zeal
for republican government and the rights of
the people, crowded their inscriptions into the
Jacobin societies, and overwhelming by their
majorities the honest and enlightened patriots
of the original institution, distorted its objects,
pursued its genuine founders under the name
of Brissotines and Girondists unto death, intrigued
themselves into the municipality of
Paris, controlled by terrorism the proceedings
of the legislature, in which they were faithfully
aided by their constipendaries there, the Dantons
and Marats of the Mountain, murdered
their King, septembrized the nation, and thus
accomplished their stipulated task of demolishing
liberty and government with it.
England now fears the rising force of this republican
nation, and by the same means is endeavoring
to effect the same course of miseries
and destruction here; it is impossible where
one sees like courses of events commence, not
to ascribe them to like causes. We know that
the government of England, maintaining itself
by corruption at home, uses the same means
in other countries of which she has any jealousy,
by subsidizing agitators and traitors
among ourselves to distract and paralyze them.
She sufficiently manifests that she has no
disposition to spare ours. We see in the proceedings
of Massachusetts, symptoms which
plainly indicate such a course, and we know
as far as such practices can ever be dragged
into light, that she has practiced, and with success,
on leading individuals of that State. Nay,
further, we see those individuals acting on
the very plan which our information had
warned us was settled between the parties.
These elements of explanation history cannot
stantly subject to his own will. The crime,
of combining with the oppressors of the earth
to extinguish the last spark of human hope,
that here, at length, will be preserved a model
government, securing to man his rights and
the fruits of his labor, by an organization constantly
subject to his own will. The crime
indeed, if accomplished, would immortalize its
perpetrators, and their names would descend in
history with those of Robespierre and his associates,
as the guardian genii of despotism, and
demons of human liberty.—
To Governor Plumer. Washington ed. vi, 414.
(M.
1815)
