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A.D.1779.] strange specimens of slang and abuse which have so often astonished Europe as reported in the speeches of honourable members of congress; but surely Thomas Paine, the author of the "Rights of Man," though the quondam staymaker of Thetford, was fitting society for Samuel Adams, the embezzler of the public money—for Arnold, the horse dealer, though now a general, and for others who by affixing, with much ostentation, the epithet "honourable" to their names, could with little difficulty trace back their origin to the lucky thieves and paupers who had been sold from the gaols of England to serve their time on the plantations of Maryland and Virginia. Paine found it necessary to give way to the storm and resign his office, though in less than two years this very honourable and high-blooded congress were only too glad to avail themselves of his talents again!

But the retirement of Paine did not end the affray. It grew hotter and hotter; Isnard and William Lee were recalled; nothing could be made out sufficiently against Deane, who defended himself by bringing such charges of villainy and corruption against members of congress and other public men that they were glad to be rid of him, and dismissed him, allowing him a paltry sum in recompense for his lost time, which he refused to accept. Innocent or guilty, he was only in the predicament of Wadworth, Morris, Greene, and even Franklin, against whom similar charges were freely advanced, and which congress would afford no means of probing by appointing any committee to examine the accounts of their agents abroad. Deane afterwards appears to have wheeled round to the cause of that England which he had used every means, through John the Painter and similar agents, to destroy, and his letters being intercepted, his name became an abomination to the patriots of the states.



In the ideal of a people contending for their liberty there mingles involuntarily the sublimest conceptions of the noblest virtues, the most exalted sentiments. We see before us a national presentiment of great men, great deeds, great thoughts and principles, hearts warmed by the spirit of the heavens; souls brilliant with a divine inspiration. With the exception of a Washington, at once grave, simple, and heroic, and perhaps a Schuyler or a Laurens, we seek in vain for the trace of these noble men and things in the revolutionary strife of America, and decline in melancholy wonder to the contemplation of courage indeed, but attended by the strange concomitants of public and private fraud, chicanery, and the entire absence of every feature of an elevated mind. No man felt this more, and lamented it more, than the one great man, Washington. He declared that friends as well as foes were combining to pull down that fabric of freedom which they had been raising at the expense of so much blood and treasure. We have already quoted his own words; we may quote those of Henry Laurens, who had now retired from the presidency of congress in disgust, his place being re-filled by John Jay. To the astonishment and indignation of the Americans, a private letter of his to governor Huiston, of Georgia, was seized by the English on their invasion of that province, and published in Rivingten's "Royal Gazette," at New York:—"Were I to unfold to you," wrote the late president, "the scenes of venality, peculation, and fraud, which I have discovered, the disclosure would astonish you; nor would you, sir, be less astonished were I by a detail to prove to you that he must be a pitiful rogue