If you chuse to confer with some of the members of the Committee at your own house on the subject of the letter it may render the sending it unnecessary; but in either case I must request and press you not to give away to evasion and delay, and that you will fix positively with them that they shall give you an answer in three or four days whether they will liberate me on the representation you have made in the letter, or whether you must be forced to go further into the subject. The state of my health will not admit of delay, and besides the tortured state of my mind wears me down. If they talk of bringing me to trial (and I well know there is no accusation against me and that they can bring none) I certainly summons you as an Evidence to my Character. This you may mention to them either as what I intend to do or what you intend to do voluntarily for me. I am anxious that you undertake this business without losing time, because if I am not liberated in the course of this decade, I intend, if in case the seventy-one detained deputies are liberated, to follow the same track that they have done, and publish my own case myself.(1) I cannot rest any longer in this state of miserable suspense, be the consequences what they may. Thomas Paine. 1 Those deputies, imprisoned for having protested against the overthrow of the Girondin government, May 31,1793, when the Convention was invaded and overawed by the armed communes of Paris. These deputies were liberated and recalled to the Convention, December 8, 1794. Paine was invited to resume his seat the day before, by a special act of the Convention, after an eloquent speech by Thibaudeau.-- _Editor._.