to destroy their church if he could; and he gave them fair notice of his intention. Although the letter to Paine was never explained away, other expressions of the President seemed to contradict the spirit of this letter, and these the President took trouble to explain. What had he meant by his famous appeal in behalf of harmony and affection in social intercourse, “without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things”? What was to become of the still more famous declaration, “We are all Republicans--we are all Federalists”? Hardly had he uttered these words than he hastened to explain them to his friends. “It was a conviction,” he wrote to Giles,[78] “that these people did not differ from us in principle which induced me to define the principles which I deemed orthodox, and to urge a reunion on those principles; and I am induced to hope it has conciliated many. I do not speak of the desperadoes of the quondam faction in and out of Congress. These I consider as incurables, on whom all attentions would be lost, and therefore will not be wasted; but my wish is to keep their flock from returning to them.” He intended to entice the flock with one hand and to belabor the shepherds with the other. In equally clear language he wrote to Governor McKean of Pennsylvania:[79]-- “My idea is that the mass of our countrymen, even of those who call themselves Federalist, are Republican. They differ from us but in a shade of more or less power to be given to the Executive or Executive organs.... To restore that harmony which our predecessors so wickedly made it their object to break up, to render us again one people acting as one nation,--should be the object of every man really a patriot. I am satisfied it can be done, and I own that the day which should convince me to the contrary would be the bitterest of my life.” This motive, he said, had dictated his answer to the New Haven remonstrants,--a paper, he added, which “will furnish new texts for the monarchists; but from them I ask nothing: I wish nothing but their eternal hatred.”