I
therefore return the letter, not to delay your answer to it, and beg
you in answering for yourself, to assure him of my respects and thankful
acceptance of Chalmers' Treaties, which I do not possess, and if you
possess yourself of the scope of his reasoning, make any answer to it
you please for me. If it had been on the rotation of my crops, I would
have answered myself, lengthily perhaps, but certainly _con gusto_.
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 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.
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