correct a material error, which I have committed in another place, to the prejudice of the Empress.  In writing some notes of the life of Captain Lewis, prefixed to his ’Expedition to the Pacific,’ I stated, that the Empress gave the permission asked, and afterwards retracted it.  This idea, after a lapse of twenty-six years, had so insinuated itself into my mind, that I committed it to paper, without the least suspicion of error.  Yet I find, on returning to my letters of that date, that the Empress refused permission at once, considering the enterprise as entirely chimerical.  But Ledyard would not relinquish it, persuading himself, that, by proceeding to St. Petersburg, he could satisfy the Empress of its practicability, and obtain her permission.  He went accordingly, but she was absent on a visit to some distant part of her dominions, and he pursued his course to within two hundred miles of Kamtschatka, where he was overtaken by an arrest from the Empress, brought back to Poland, and there dismissed.  I must, therefore, in justice, acquit the Empress of ever having for a moment countenanced, even by the indulgence of an innocent passage through her territories, this interesting enterprise.

The pecuniary distresses of France produced this year a measure, of which there had been no example for near two centuries; and the consequences of which, good and evil, are not yet calculable.  For its remote causes, we must go a little back.

Celebrated writers of France and England had already sketched good principles on the subject of government:  yet the American Revolution seems first to have awakened the thinking part of the French nation in general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk.  The officers, too, who had been to America, were mostly young men, less shackled by habit and prejudice, and more ready to assent to the suggestions of common sense, and feeling of common rights, than others.  They came back with new ideas and impressions.  The press, notwithstanding its shackles, began to disseminate them; conversation assumed new freedoms; politics became the theme of all societies, male and female, and a very extensive and zealous party was formed, which acquired the appellation of the Patriotic party, who, sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, sighed for occasions for reforming it.  This party comprehended all the honesty of the kingdom, sufficiently at leisure to think, the men of letters, the easy Bourgeois, the young nobility, partly from reflection, partly from mode; for these sentiments became matter of mode, and, as such, united most of the young women to the party.  Happily for the nation, it happened, at the same moment, that the dissipations of the queen and court, the abuses of the pension-list, and dilapidations in the administration of every branch of the finances, had exhausted the treasures and credit of the nation, insomuch, that its most necessary functions were paralyzed.