The conspirators having been severely galled and checked in their career by the artillery of freedom, have made more vigorous and successful efforts to silence her batteries, while falsehood with all her delusions is making new and greater exertions in favor of ambition. On the one hand,
every avenue to information is as far as possible cut off, the usual communication between the states through the medium of the press, is in a great measure destroyed by a new arrangement at the Post-Office, scarcely a newspaper is suffered to pass by this conveyance, and the arguments of a Findley, a Whitehill and a Smilie, that bright constellation of patriots are suppressed, and a spurious publication substituted; and on the other hand the select committee are assiduously employed in manufacturing deception in all its ensnaring colours, and having an adequate fund at their command, they are deluging the country with their productions. The only newspaper that circulates extensively out of the city is kept running over with deceptive inventions. Doctor Puff the paragraphist, has scarcely slept since his appointment, having received orders to work double tides; beneath his creative pen thousands correspondents rise into view, who all harmonize in their sentiments and information about the new-constitution;
1 but the chief reliance is on James the Caledonian, who can to appearance distroy all distinction between liberty and despotism, and make the latter pass for the former, who can bewilder truth in all the mazes of sophistry, and render the plainest propositions problematical-He cameleon-like can vary his appearance at pleasure, and assume any character for the purposes of deception. In the guise of a Conciliator, in the Independent Gazetteer, he professes great candour and moderation, admits some of the principal objections to the new constitution to be well founded, and insidiously proposes a method to remove them, which is to consider the first Congress under the new constitution as a convention, competent to supply all defects in the system of government. This is really a discovery that does honor to his invention. What! a legislative declaration or law a basis upon which to rest our dearest liberties. Does he suppose the people have so little penetration as not to see through so flimsey a delusion, that such a security would amount to no more than the will and pleasure of their rulers, who might repeal this fundamental sanction whenever ambition stimulated?-in the feigned character of a freeman, he combats the weighty arguments of the minority of the late convention, by a meer play upon words, carefully avoiding the real merits of the question; and we moreover trace him in a variety miscellaneous productions in every shape and form, he occasionally assists Doctor Puff in the fabrication of extracts of letters, paragraphs, correspondents, &c. &c.