shall not be derogatory either to the public liberty or my own personal honor.  This letter-writer says, I am ‘for peace; but it is only with France.’  He has told half the truth.  He would have told the whole, if he had added England.  I am for peace with both countries.  I know that both of them have given, and are daily giving, sufficient cause of war; that in defiance of the laws of nations, they are every day trampling on the rights of the neutral powers, whenever they can thereby do the least injury, either to the other.  But, as I view a peace between France and England the ensuing winter to be certain, I have thought it would have been better for us to have continued to bear from France through the present summer, what we have been bearing both from her and England these four years, and still continue to bear from England, and to have required indemnification in the hour of peace, when I verily believe it would have been yielded by both.  This seems to be the plan of the other neutral nations; and whether this, or the commencing war on one of them, as we have done, would have been wisest, time and events must decide.  But I am quite at a loss on what ground the letter-writer can question the opinion, that France had no intention of making war on us, and was willing to treat with Mr. Gerry, when we have this from Talleyrand’s letter, and from the written and verbal information of our Envoys.  It is true then, that, as with England, we might of right have chosen either war or peace, and have chosen peace, and prudently in my opinion, so with France, we might also of right have chosen either peace or war, and we have chosen war.  Whether the choice may be a popular one in the other States, I know not.  Here it certainly is not; and I have no doubt the whole American people will rally ere long to the same sentiment, and re-judge those, who, at present, think they have all judgment in their own hands.

These observations will show you how far the imputations in the paragraph sent me approach the truth.  Yet they are not intended for a newspaper.  At a very early period of my life, I determined never to put a sentence into any newspaper.  I have religiously adhered to the resolution through my life, and have great reason to be contented with it.  Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time and that of twenty aids could effect.  For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented.  I have thought it better to trust to the justice of my countrymen, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me, and what they knew of me before the epoch, since which a particular party has supposed it might answer some view of theirs to vilify me in the public eye.  Some, I know, will not reflect how apocryphal is the testimony of enemies so palpably betraying the views with which they give it.  But this is an injury to which duty requires every