has been taken advantage of to slander the friends of popular rights; and I am happy to observe, that as far as the circle of my observation and information extends, every body has lost sight of them, and views the abstract attempt on their natural and constitutional rights in all its nakedness.  I have never heard, or heard of, a single expression or opinion which did not condemn it as an inexcusable aggression.  And with respect to the transactions against the excise law, it appears to me that you are all swept away in the torrent of governmental opinions, or that we do not know what these transactions have been.  We know of none which, according to the definitions of the law, have been any thing more than riotous.  There was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation.  But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination:  but we shall see, I suppose, what the court lawyers, and courtly judges, and would-be ambassadors will make of it.  The excise law is an infernal one.  The first error was to admit it by the constitution; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be, to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union, and setting us all afloat to choose what part of it we will adhere to.  The information of our militia, returned from the westward, is uniform, that though the people there let them pass quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand places of the Allegany; that their detestation of the excise law is universal, and has now associated to it a detestation of the government; and that separation which perhaps was a very distant and problematical event, is now near, and certain, and determined in the mind of every man.  I expected to have seen some justification of arming one part of the society against another; of declaring a civil war the moment before the meeting of that body which has the sole right of declaring war; of being so patient of the kicks and scoffs of our enemies, and rising at a feather against our friends; of adding a million to the public debt and deriding us with recommendations to pay it if we can, &c. &c.  But the part of the speech which was to be taken as a justification of the armament, reminded me of Parson Saunders’s demonstration why minus into minus makes plus.  After a parcel of shreds of stuff from AEsop’s fables and Tom Thumb, he jumps all at once into his ergo, minus multiplied into minus makes phis.  Just so the fifteen thousand men enter after the fables, in the speech.