As the affairs of the country to which I am returned are of more
importance to the world, and to me, than of that I have lately left,
(for it is through the new world the old must be regenerated, if
regenerated at all,) I shall not take up the time of the reader with an
account of scenes that have passed in France, many of which are painful
to remember and horrid to relate, but come at once to the circumstances
in which I find America on my arrival.
Fourteen years, and something more, have produced a change, at least
among a part of the people, and I ask my-self what it is? I meet or hear
of thousands of my former connexions, who are men of the same principles
and friendships as when I left them. But a non-descript race, and of
equivocal generation, assuming the name of _Federalist_,--a name that
describes no character of principle good or bad, and may equally
be applied to either,--has since started up with the rapidity of a
mushroom, and like a mushroom is withering on its rootless stalk. Are
those men _federalized_ to support the liberties of their country or to
overturn them? To add to its fair fame or riot on its spoils? The
name contains no defined idea. It is like John Adams's definition of a
Republic, in his letter to Mr. Wythe of Virginia.(2) _It is_, says he,
_an empire of laws and not of men_. But as laws may be bad as well as
good, an empire of laws may be the best of all governments or the worst
of all tyrannies. But John Adams is a man of paradoxical heresies, and
consequently of a bewildered mind. He wrote a book entitled, "_A Defence
of the American Constitutions_," and the principles of it are an attack
upon them. But the book is descended to the tomb of forgetfulness, and
the best fortune that can attend its author is quietly to follow its
fate. John was not born for immortality. But, to return to Federalism.