I do not know whether you have received a package from me which I entrusted several months ago to a Frenchman who was on his way to Philadelphia and where I confirmed receipt of your letter.1 I naturally appreciated, sir, the trust with which you conferred with me in the letter. Your trust was as gratifying to me, as I felt ashamed in seeing that, addressing you, I may have employed an epithet in which meanness could construe a very different sense than the one I had lent it. I am convinced that you could not have been mistaken by it, since I gave you the epithet in the same sense 493 as to Messrs. Necker and De Lolme.2 I nevertheless admit that in writing for the French I should have considered that this little piece of writing could cross the Atlantic, and that mean-spirited interpretations and a factional spirit could glean a kind of insult from a designation I had intended as a form of praise. For a moment, I thought of having an insert made for the English edition and to leave a note on it. But whatever turn of phrase I came up with, I feared it would be suspected that I received on your behalf some kind of complaint, and I preferred instead to not have sent to America the 200 copies I earmarked for it. I owed you, sir, this sort of atonement, for, unwittingly, I nearly repaid with evil the goodness you did me unbeknownst to you. For on your end, you called me Doctor in your works, without my ever having been honored with the cap by any university, which did not prevent me from being quite flattered to receive it by your hand.

Mr. Elmsly, who will be honored to hand this letter over to you and the packet I include with it, is one of the most faithful friends I have in this country, and in all regards one of the most respectable men that I have ever met. His departure for America is an irreparable loss for his friends.3 Since the office of chief justice, to which he will be appointed on the frontier of the United States, will put him in a position to maintain steady ties with your government, I promptly seized upon this opportunity to have him make your acquaintance, and I would have owed him this favor were it only to repay a debt of gratitude, so far as was in my power, for the courtesy he did me in translating the Account of the Late Revolution in Geneva, the style of which garnered me praises from you which are due to him. There remains nothing more for me to say, sir, except that America will find in him a peaceful man, and that the laws of the state where he is going will prove to be safeguarded by the most honorable man that I know. I do not have the heart to speak to you of unfortunate Europe. Each of the political societies is being crushed one after the other by the French, exactly as when, during the destruction of the monarchy, each body corporate, the nobility, the clergy, and the parliaments, witnessed with indifference the crushing of the bodies it envied, the debris of which served as a weapon to crush it in its turn. It is quite futile now to count on the exhaustion of French funds in the hopes of seeing them repulsed to their former borders. To me, everything seems altered in this regard, ever since they discovered the secret of taking possession of their enemies’ finances. This country is holding steady against the storm and will doubtlessly emerge the stronger once it is left alone in the ring, which is not outside the realm of possibility. But what shall now be the result of this sad war’s prolongation? I see in it only one cause for comfort, which is that the fanatical fever of the French appears to have broken, and that while they can conquer, they can no longer revolutionize.

How many praises will America deserve one day for having known how to elude the double epidemic of this revolution and this war! And how much do I bless the wise Washington for having been able to outwit those Americans who tried to provoke a breach with this country! I am quite 494 certain that in this event, you have been one of the angels of peace and one of the first defenders of your federal Constitution. This belief adds still more to all of the sentiments of respect which I have declared to you, and with which I have the honor to be, sir, your most humble and most obedient servant