1900.] ROSENGARTEN—AMERICAN HISTORY. 143 
Avis aux Hessots et autres Peuples de 1 Allemagne, Vendus par leurs 
Princes «1? Angleterre, a Cleves chez Bertol, 1777, which is now 
very rare, Kapp says, because the Elector of Cassel bought up all 
the copies he could find. It is very characteristic of the ‘two, Mira- 
beau and Franklin, that the latter refers to his now famous letter 
only once, and that in sending it to his friend Winthrop, as one of 
the issues of the press then current, it nowhere appears in his 
printed works or correspondence, but in the Life of Mirabeau, by 
his son, it is said that the first work written by Mirabeau in Am- 
sterdam was the pamphlet Avis aux Hessois, pp. 12, 1775, that it 
was translated into five languages, and reprinted twice by Mirabeau, 
in LZ’ Espion dévalisé, chap. 16, pp. 195-209, and in L’£ssazi sur le 
despotisme, pp. 509-18, Paris, Le Gay, 1792, and Mirabeau him- 
self speaks of it in his Le¢tres de Vincennes on March 14, 1784, and 
March 24,1786. A reply to it, Conseils de la raison, was published 
in Amsterdam in 1777, by Smidorf, supposed to be inspired by the 
Minister of the Elector of Hesse Cassel, Schlieffen ; to it Mirabeau 
replied in return in his Réponse aux Conseils de la Raison. All of 
these and other pamphlets, such as Raynal’s on the side of the 
Americans, are now forgotten, but Franklin’s clever skit continues 
to be reprinted and read, and to keep alive the feeling against the 
German princes who sent their soldiers to fight in a war which, as 
Frederick the Great said, was none of their business. However, 
the fact remains that it was through these Germans that America 
got many good citizens from their ranks, and better still, many of 
those who went home wrote of this country in a way that quick- 
ened emigration, in which, indeed, some of them took their part 
later on. 
To this and similar attacks the Elector, through his Minister, 
Schlieffen, made answers in the Dutch newspapers, then the most 
largely sold, because they were free from censorship. Abbé Ray- 
nal, then an accepted historical authority, supported Mirabeau’s 
attack by one that was met by Schlieffen in 1782. Kapp says 
Franklin himself both inspired and drew from this flood of French 
pamphlets against Great Britain and its German allies; but Kapp 
attributes this Hohendorff letter not to Franklin but to some French 
pamphleteer of Mirabeau’s circle, and says it was revived by Léher 
at the time of the Know-Nothing agitation, and attributed to a St. 
Louis paper, although its falsity was shown in an article printed in 
the Vew Military Journal, Darmstadt, 1858, No. 14. 
PROC. AMER. FHILOS. SOC. XXXIX. 162. J. PRINTED MAY 16, 1900. 
