The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
FOREIGN RELATIONS / WAR BETWEEN BRITAIN AND FRANCE
I thank you for the pamphlet of Erskine enclosed in your favor of the
9th instant, and still more for the evidence which your letter affords
me of the health of your mind, and I hope of your body also. Erskine
has been reprinted here, and has done good. It has refreshed the
memory of those who had been willing to forget how the war between
France and England had been produced; and who, aping St. James, called
it a defensive war on the part of England. I wish any events could
induce us to cease to copy such a model, and to assume the dignity of
being original. They had their paper system, stockjobbing,
speculations, public debt, moneyed interest, etc., and all this was
contrived for us. They raised their cry against jacobinism and
revolutionists, we against democratic societies and anti-federalists;
their alarmists sounded insurrection, ours marched an army to look for
one, but they could not find it. I wish the parallel may stop here,
and that we may avoid, instead of imitating, a general bankruptcy and
disastrous war.
to Horatio Gates, 30 May 1797
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