Dear Sir: I thank you for your very friendly and affectionate letter of the 18th September which I did not receive till this morning.(1) It has relieved my mind from a load of disquietude. You will easily suppose that if the information I received had been exact, my situation was without hope. I had in that case neither section, department nor Country, to reclaim me; but that is not all, I felt a poignancy of grief, in having the least reason to suppose that America had so soon forgotten me who had never forgotten her. Mr. Labonadaire, in a note of yesterday, directed me to write to the Convention. As I suppose this measure has been taken in concert with you, I have requested him to shew you the letter, of which he will make a translation to accompany the original. (I cannot see what motive can induce them to keep me in prison. It will gratify the English Government and afflict the friends I have in America. The supporters of the system of Terror might apprehend that if I was in liberty and in America I should publish the history of their crimes, but the present persons who have overset that immoral System ought to have no such apprehension. On the contrary, they ought to consider me as one of themselves, at least as one of their friends. Had I been an insignificant character I had not been in arrestation. It was the literary and philosophical reputation I had gained, in the world, that made them my Enemies; and I am the victim of the principles, and if I may be permitted to say it, of the talents, that procured me the esteem of America. My character is the _secret_ of my arrestation.) 1 Printed in the letter to Washington, chap. XXII. The delay of sixteen days in Monroe's letter was probably due to the manouvres of Paine's enemies on the Committee of Public Safety. He was released only after their removal from the Committee, and the departure of Gouverneur Morris.-- _Editor._, If the letter I have written be not covered by other authority than my own it will have no effect, for they already know all that I can say. On what ground do they pretend to deprive America of the service of any of her citizens without assigning a cause, or only the flimsy one of my being born in England? Gates, were he here, might be arrested on the same pretence, and he and Burgoyne be confounded together.