“When a foreign Government hires a writer, it takes care that his labours shall be distributed, whether the readers are all willing to pay for them or not. This we daily see verified in the distribution of certain blasphemous gazettes, which, though kicked from the door with disdain, fly in at the window. Now, has this ever been the case with the works of Peter Porcupine? Were they ever thrusted upon people in spite of their remonstrances? Can Mr. Bradford say that thousands of these pamphlets have ever been paid for by any agent of Great Britain? Can he say that I have ever distributed any of them? No; he can say no such thing. They had, at first, to encounter every difficulty, and they have made their way supported by public approbation, and by that alone. Mr. Bradford, if he is candid enough to repeat what he told me, will say that the British Consul, when he purchased half a dozen of them, insisted upon having them _at the wholesale price_! Did this look like a desire to encourage them? Besides, those who know anything of Mr. Bradford will never believe that he would have lent his aid to a British agent’s publications; for, of all the Americans I have yet conversed with, he seems to entertain the greatest degree of rancour against that nation. “I have every reason to believe that the British Consul was far from approving of some at least of my publications. I happened to be in a bookseller’s shop, unseen by him, when he had the goodness to say that I was a ‘_wild fellow_.’ On which I shall only observe, that when the king bestows on me about five hundred pounds sterling a year, perhaps I may become a _tame fellow_, and hear my master, my countrymen, my friends, and my parents, belied and execrated, without saying one single word in their defence. “Had the Minister of Great Britain employed me to write, can it be supposed that he would not furnish me with the means of living well, without becoming the retailer of my own works? Can it be supposed that he would have suffered me ever to have appeared on the scene? It must be a very poor king that he serves, if he could not afford me more than I can get by keeping a book-shop. An ambassador from a king of the gipsies could not have acted a meaner part. What! where was all the ‘gold of Pitt’? That gold which tempted, according to the Democrats, an American envoy to sell his country and two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the bargain--that gold which, according to the Convention of France, has made one half of that nation cut the throats of the other half--that potent gold could not keep Peter Porcupine from standing behind a counter to sell a pen-knife or a quire of paper.