Your request, my dear son, appears dev’lish new,
He told him, in short, he was damnably poor,
Kick’d him out of his den, and slam’d to the door.
It is a great pity we are obliged to quit this delightful theme to return to the dry mercenary overtures of Mr. Randolph.
As it appears that he cannot persuade us that the money was to be employed for the purpose of coming at the machinations of the English, let us now see to what purpose it is much more likely it was to have been applied.
From the intercepted letter we learn, that the complying with the overtures would have enabled the French Republic to decide, for this country, on civil war or on peace; and we are told, in the extract No. 6, which has been intruded on us purposely to give a favourable turn to this passage of the latter, that the money, if obtained, would have put it in the power of four men to save the country. Mr. Randolph, in handling these two passages, has gone rather beyond his usual degree of assurance. He has taken a phrase from one and a phrase from the other, and tacked them together to suit himself. This done, he boldly asks, “what were to be the functions of these men.” And then comes out his triumphant answer—“To save the country from a civil war.” This is Lord Peter again with his totidem verbis. By running over the two papers, or either of them, this way, culling a phrase here and a phrase there, he may make them say anything he pleases; and he may do the same thing with any other writing. In this manner he may make even the New Year’s Gift say that he is an upright, worthy, incorruptible man; and God knows how far that is from the sentiments of the author. Is this phrase, which he compounded of ingredients taken from two different places, to be found in any part of citizen Fauchet’s dispatches? Has this tattling father confessor any where said, that the overtures were for money to save the country from a civil war? Has he said anything that will countenance such an inference? No; his dispatches, in every rational construction they will bear, clearly lead to a contrary conclusion.
He could have decided on civil war or on peace. If we are to understand by civil war, a successful opposition to the Federal government, the whole of his letter, from one end to the other, proves that nothing was so near his heart. He everywhere exclaims against the ambitious views of the Government, and defends the cause of the insurgents. He speaks of them as an oppressed people, and of the laws which they were armed to oppose, as harsh and unnecessary. The anarchical assembly in the neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, those outrageous villains who insulted the officers of justice, plundered the mail, drove peaceable and orderly people from their dwellings, dragged others forth to endure every other cruelty short of death, and who, in a word, were daily committing robbery and murder; this assembly of ruffians he calls, “the very pacific union of the counties in Braddock’s Field! a union which could not justify the raising of so great a force as fifteen thousand men.—Besides,” added he, “the principles uttered in the declaration of these people, rather announced ardent minds to be calmed, than anarchists to be subdued.”
When he comes to speak of those who wished to enforce the excise law, he gives way to the most bitter invectives, and almost curses the officers of Government, who counselled the marching of the troops. But, at last, he is compelled to give an account of the triumph of the Federal army; and here we plainly perceive, by the chagrin he expresses at that event, what he would have desired. He laments that the Government will acquire stability from it “for one complete session at least,” the discredit it will throw on “the insurgent principles of the patriots,” and concludes with this, to him, melancholy reflection:
“Who knows what will be the limits of this triumph? Perhaps advantage will be taken by it to obtain some laws for strengthening the Government, and still more precipitating the propensity, already visible, that it has towards aristocracy!”
Who, then, can be stupid enough to believe that if this man had had “some thousands of dollars to advance,” he would have advanced them to aid the Government, either directly or indirectly, against the insurgents, and to save the country from a civil war? And yet this we must believe, before we believe that Mr. Randolph, who was in all his secrets, would have made him overtures for that purpose.
As to the words in the dispatch No. 6, which are allowed to signify save the country, they must not be thus disjointed from what precedes them. The passage is this:
“Scarce was the commotion known when the Secretary of State came to my house. All his countenance was grief. He requested of me a private conversation. It is all over, said he to me. A civil war is about to ravage our unhappy country. Four men, by their talents, their influence, and their energy, may save it.”
Save it from what? Not from a civil war; it was, it seems, too late to do that; for it was all over. A civil war was to take place; that was a settled point, though the commotion was scarcely known; but four men, with the help of citizen Fauchet’s dollars, might save the country. That is, bring it out of that civil war refined and regenerated, and unclogged with the Federal government, or, at least, with those men who thwarted the views of citizen Fauchet and his nation.
Of all the expressions to be found in the Babylonish vocabulary of the French Revolution, there is not one the value of which is so precisely fixed as that before us—to save the country. When their first Assembly, the fathers of all the miseries of their country, violating the powers with which they were invested, reduced their king to an automation, laid their crooked fingers on the property of sixty or seventy thousand innocent persons, drove the faithful pastors from their flocks, and replaced them by a herd of vile apostates, they had the impudence to declare that they had saved their country! When their worthy successors hurled this degraded monarch from his throne; and, after a series of injustices, insults, and cruelties, as unmerited as unheard of, put an end to his sufferings on a scaffold, they, too, had saved their country! They have saved it, alas! again and again! Every signal act of their folly and tyranny, every one of their massacres, has ended with a declaration of their having saved their country. Even when they exchanged the Christian religion, the words of eternal life, for the impious and illiterate systems of a Paine and a Volney; when they declared the God of Heaven to be an impostor, and forbade his worship on pain of death; even then they pretended they had saved their country!——If Mr. Randolph meant to save his country in this way, he is welcome for me to the exclusive possession of the honour due to his zeal. He might surely venture to make overtures to citizen Fauchet for operating a salvation of this kind, without the least fear of a rebuff. But, stopping short of French salvation, he might wish to save it from the excise; from the Treasurer’s plans of finance; from a treaty with England; and, above all, from that “strengthening the Government, which had so visible a propensity to aristocracy.” Besides, when a man comes to ask for a bribe, he must have some excuse; for, base as he may be, and lost to shame, and well as he may be convinced that the person whom he addresses is as base as himself; yet there is something about the human form, though disfigured with a tricoloured cockade, which reminds the wretch that he has a soul.
As a convincing proof that the overtures mentioned by citizen Fauchet ought to be understood as made to obtain money for supporting, in some way or other, the insurrection in the West, and that the whole letter inevitably conveys this meaning, we need no other proof than that furnished by Mr. Randolph himself. It will certainly be supposed that he, above all others, would read this essay on bribery and corruption with an anxious and scrutinizing eye. We may fairly presume that he conned it over with more attention than ever school-boy did his lesson, or monk his breviary; and that, from the moment he was in his penitential weeds, he repeated the some-thousand-dollar sentence as often as a devotee Catholic repeats her Ave-Maria. Yet, notwithstanding all this; notwithstanding the interest he had in finding some other meaning for it; notwithstanding even his talent at warping, and twisting, and turning everything that falls in his way, we find him, on the 19th of August, writing to the President thus:
“For I here most solemnly deny, that any overture ever came from me which was to produce money to me [and not to flour-merchants], or any others for me; and that in any manner, directly or indirectly, was a shilling ever received by me; nor was it ever contemplated by me that one shilling should be applied by Mr. Fauchet to any purpose relative to the insurrection.”
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