the editor, which are an exaggerated commentary on the fabricated paragraph itself, and silently leaves to his reader to make the ready inference that these were the sentiments of the letter.  Proof is the duty of the affirmative side.  A negative cannot be possibly proved.  But, in defect of impossible proof of what was not in the original letter, I have its press-copy still in my possession.  It has been shown to several, and is open to any one who wishes to see it.  I have presumed only that the interpolation was done in Paris.  But I never saw the letter in either its Italian or French dress, and it may have been done here, with the commentary handed down to posterity by the judge.  The genuine paragraph, re-translated through Italian and French into English, as it appeared here in a federal paper, besides the mutilated hue which these translations and re-translations of it produced generally, gave a mistranslation of a single word, which entirely perverted its meaning, and made it a pliant and fertile text of misrepresentation of my political principles.  The original, speaking of an Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratical party, which had sprung up since he had left us, states their object to be ’to draw over us the substance, as they had already done the forms of the British government.’  Now the ‘forms’ here meant, were the levees, birth-days, the pompous cavalcade to the State House on the meeting of Congress, the formal speech from the throne, the procession of Congress in a body to re-echo the speech in an answer, &c. &c.  But the translator here, by substituting form in the singular number, for forms in the plural, made it mean the frame or organization of our government, or its form of legislative, executive, and judiciary authorities, co-ordinate and independent:  to which form it was to be inferred that I was an enemy.  In this sense they always quoted it, and in this sense Mr. Pickering still quotes, it (pages 34, 35, 38), and countenances the inference.  Now General Washington perfectly understood what I meant by these forms, as they were frequent subjects of conversation between us.  When, on my return from Europe, I joined the government in March, 1790, at New York, I was much astonished, indeed, at the mimicry I found established of royal forms and ceremonies, and more alarmed at the unexpected phenomenon, by the monarchical sentiments I heard expressed and openly maintained in every company, and among others by the high members of the government, executive and judiciary (General Washington alone excepted), and by a great part of the legislature, save only some members who had been of the old Congress, and a very few of recent introduction.  I took occasion, at various times, of expressing to General Washington my disappointment at these symptoms of a change of principle, and that I thought them encouraged by the forms and ceremonies, which I found prevailing, not at all in character with the simplicity of republican government, and looking as if wishfully to those of