eager in the Pursuit of Pleasure or of Gain as to be totally thoughtless of their Country?  I hope not.  Gracious Heaven!  Defend us from Vanity Folly & the inordinate Love of Money.  Your News Papers are silent upon every Subject of Importance but the Description of a Feast, or the Eclat of some Great Man.  Your able Patriot is wholly employd in spirited Exertions of the Military Kind, or surely he wd have pourd forth all his Eloquence against so detestable a Motion.—­” The Motion did not obtain.”  I rejoyce in this; But Do you do Justice [to] the House by so faint an Expression?  I hope they rejected it with every Mark of Contempt & Indignation.  Do the Gentlemen who made & supported this Motion know, that even in this Quaker Country, they are trying & condemning & I suppose will hang some of their considerable Men for Crimes not inferior to those of Gray & Gardiner.  Jemmy Anderson I have forgot.  I suppose he is a little Man & a Scotchman.  It is the opinion of the People in this Country, that a Galloway could not atone for his publick Crimes with the Sacrifice of an hundred Lives.  A Galloway, a Gray, a Gardiner!  Examine them & say which is the greatest Criminal.  Confiscation you tell me labors—­“it labors very hard”!  I have heard objections made to it, not in this Country, but in my own.  But I thought those objections were made by interested Men.  Shall those Traiters who first conspired the Ruin of our Liberties; Those who basely forsook their Country in her Distress & sought Protection from the Enemy when they thought them in the Plenitude of Power—­who have been ever since stimulating & doing all in their Power to aid and comfort them while they have been exerting their utmost to enslave & ruin us.  Shall these Wretches have their Estates reservd for them & restored at the Conclusion of this glorious Struggle in which some of the richest Blood of America has been spilled, for the sake of a few who may have Money in England & for this Reason have maintaind a dastardly and criminal Neutrality?  It cannot be.  I venturd to speak my Mind in a Place where I could claim no Right to speak.  I spoke with Leave which I should have disdaind to have done, had I not felt the Importance of the Subject to our Country.  I will tell you my Opinion.  If you do not act a decisive Part—­If you suffer those Traiters to return & enjoy their Estates, the World will say, you have no Sense of publick Injury & have lost your understanding.

Adieu my dear Friend,

TO MRS. ADAMS.

[Ms., Samuel Adams Papers, Lenox Library.]

Philadelphia Octob 20th -78

MY DEAR BETSY