2176. DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES, Federalist condemnation of.—
The denunciation
of the Democratic Societies is one of the
extraordinary acts of boldness of which we
have seen so many from the faction of monocrats.
It is wonderful, indeed, that the President
[Washington] should have permitted
himself to be the organ of such an attack on
the freedom of discussion, the freedom of
writing, printing and publishing. It must
be a matter of rare curiosity to get at the
modifications of these rights proposed by
them, and to see what line their ingenuity
would draw between democratical societies,
whose avowed object is the nourishment of
the republican principles of our Constitution,
and the Society of the Cincinnati, a self-created
one, carving out for itself hereditary
distinctions, lowering over our Constitution
eternally, meeting together in all parts of the
Union, periodically, with closed doors, accumulating
a capital in their separate treasury,
corresponding secretly and regularly, and
of which society the very persons denouncing
the democrats are themselves the fathers,
founders and high officers. Their sight must
be perfectly dazzled by the glittering of
crowns and coronets, not to see the extravagance
of the proposition to suppress the
friends of general freedom, while those who
wish to confine that freedom to the few are
permitted to go on in their principles and practices.
I here put out of sight the persons whose
misbehavior has been taken advantage of to
slander the friends of popular rights; and I
am happy to observe that as far as the circle
of my observation and information extends,
everybody has lost sight of them, and views
the abstract attempt on their natural and constitutional
rights in all its nakedness. I have
never heard, or heard of, a single expression
or opinion which did not condemn it as an
inexcusable aggression.—
To James Madison. Washington ed. iv, 111.
Ford ed., vi, 516.
(M.
Dec. 1794)
