“As to my writing, I never did slander any one, if the promulgation of useful truths be not slander. Innocence and virtue I have often endeavoured to defend, but I never defamed either. I have, indeed, stripped the close-drawn veil of hypocrisy; I have ridiculed the follies, and lashed the vices of thousands, and have done it sometimes perhaps with a rude and violent hand. But these are not the days for gentleness and mercy. Such as is the temper of the foe, such must be that of his opponent. Seeing myself published as a rogue, _and my wife a whore_; being persecuted with such infamous, such base and hellish calumny in the _philanthropic_ city of Philadelphia, merely for asserting _the truth_ respecting others, was not calculated, I assure you, to sweeten my temper, and turn my ink into honey-dew. “My attachment to order and good government, nothing but the impudence of Jacobinism can deny. The object not only of my own publications, but also of all those which I have introduced or encouraged, from the first moment that I appeared on the public scene to the present day, has been to lend some aid in stemming the torrent of anarchy and confusion. To undeceive the misguided, by tearing the mask from the artful and ferocious villains who owing to the infatuation of the poor, and the supineness of the rich, have made such fearful progress in the destruction of all that is amiable and good and sacred among men. To the government of this country in particular it has been my constant study to yield all the support in my power. When that government, or the worthy men who administer it have been traduced and vilified, I have stood forward in their defence, and that too, in times when its friends were some of them locked up in silence, and others giving way to the audacious violence of its foes. Not that I am so foolishly vain as to attribute to my illiterate voter a thousandth part of the merit my friends are inclined to allow it. As I wrote the other day to a gentleman who had paid me some compliments on this score, ‘I should never look on my family with a dry eye if I did not hope to outlive my works’. They are mere transitory beings to which the revolutionary storm has given life, and which with that storm will expire. But, what I contend for and what nobody can deny, I have done all that laid in my power, all that I was able by any means to accomplish in order to counteract the nefarious effects of the enemies of the American government and nation.