Page:Sunbeams extracted from cucumbers.djvu/22

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16

Cosmopolite, Mr. Genet, who came the messenger of peace and science to this guilty and deluded people, and who treated us precisely according to those assumed characters, opened his budget with an explicit renunciation of the principles of Puffendorf, Vattel, and other writers of that description, and declared that his nation would be governed by none of their obsolete maxims.

Indeed, this learned nation, have yielded implicitly to the sentiments of Mr. Volney, Mr. Paine, and Mr. Godwin, in all questions of morals and policy; and in all matters of religion there is associated with them that learned and pious divine, the Bishop of Autun, who had the Cosmopolitism to boast that he had preached twenty years, under an oath, without believing a word which he uttered.

To aid the establishment of these projects, the credulity of the present age has become truly astonishing. There appears to be a new machinery for the mind, by which its capacity believing certain things is perfect. It is believed that Socrates, and Plato, and SenecaBacon, Newton and Locke, and all who lived and died prior to the commencement of the French Revolution, were either fools or slaves. That in no country but France is there science or virtue. That the body of the people in England are now groaning under the most oppressive bondage and tyranny. That this was precisely the case in Holland, Italy and Switzerland, till France introduced them to their present happy condition. It is believed by all the Cosmopolites in Europe, and by many in America—by all genuine Jacobins, by many Democrats, by the greater part of the readers of the Aurora, the Argus and the Bee, and by an innumerable multitude who don't read at all, that the Citizens of these States, and particularly of New-England, are miserable, benighted, enslaved and wretched dupes;