Before the publication of the documents which Morse gave to the world in his fast sermon of 1799, Robison’s _Proofs of a Conspiracy_ constituted the chief if not the sole resource of the friends of the agitation. Barruel had been appealed to, but only in the form of such scanty excerpts from his writings as percolated to America through the fingers of his English reviewers and, as we have seen, in settings which provided ammunition for both sides in the controversy. Now the hour had come when the supporters of the Illuminati alarm in New England were to be privileged to make a full and free appeal to their second great ally from abroad.[824] The facts regarding the nature of the reception accorded Barruel’s composition in New England are meagre in the extreme. In this very circumstance, one may suppose, is found the best of all evidences that the book failed to fulfil the hopes of its friends. It is true that within seven weeks after the public announcement of the fact that the _Memoirs of Jacobinism_ were ready for distribution at Hartford, one of Morse’s correspondents at that place was able to assure him that “the facts ... in Du Pan, Robison, and Barruel have got into every farm house” in that section of the country.[825] It is also true that in order to insure a wide reading of what were supposed to be the more significant portions of Barruel’s voluminous work, an abridgment of it was undertaken and published in the columns of such leading papers as the _Connecticut Courant_[826] and the _Massachusetts Mercury_.[827] Nevertheless, the inference is unavoidable that at the most the cause of the agitators received only a momentary quickening from this quarter. If anything, the very flatness of the reception accorded Barruel’s work served to quiet the public mind in New England on the subject of Illuminism. The precious conceit which the supporters of the charge of an American conspiracy of the Illuminati had imported from abroad, _viz._, that the two “great” European writers on the subject of Illuminism, Robison and Barruel, while working independently had unearthed the same set of facts and arrived at the same conclusion as to their import, fell quickly enough to the ground. Whatever the facts might be regarding the situation in Europe, it speedily became clear that Barruel had no clear and steady light to throw upon the situation in America, and even those who hoped most from the publication of the _Memoirs of Jacobinism_ were soon forced to admit that the American reading public had little taste for the prolix romancings of the French abbé.[828]