5332. MONARCHY, Advocates for.—[further continued]..
The aspect of our politics
has wonderfully changed since you left us.
In place of that noble love of liberty, and republican
government which carried us triumphantly
through the war, an Anglican, monarchical,
aristocratical party has sprung up, whose
avowed object is to draw over us the substance,
as they have already done the forms of the
British government. The mass of our citizens,
however, remain true to their republican principles;
the whole landed interest is republican,
and so is a great mass of talents. Against us
are the Executive, the Judiciary, two out of
three branches of the Legislature, all the officers
of the Government, all who want to be officers,
all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism
to the boisterous sea of liberty. British merchants
and Americans trading on British capitals,
speculators and holders in the banks and
public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes
of corruption, and for assimilating us in
all things to the rotten as well as the sound
parts of the British model. It would give you
a fever were I to name to you the apostates
who have gone over to these heresies, men who
were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the
council, but who have had their heads shorn by
* * * England. In short, we are likely to
preserve the liberty we have obtained only by
unremitting labors and perils. But we shall
preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth
on the good side is so great, as to leave no
danger that force will ever be attempted against
us. We have only to awake and snap the
Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling
us during the first sleep which succeeded
our labors.—
To Philip Mazzei. Washington ed. iv, 139.
Ford ed., vii, 75.
(M.
April. 1796)
See Mazzei.
