Democratic societies, whose raison d'etre was in the main hostility to England and sympathy for France, sprang into existence all over the United States, and one was organized in Philadelphia, with Rittenhouse as president. Among its members were A. J. Dallas, Peter S. Duponceau. Colonel Clement Biddle, Benjamin Rush, Cæsar Rodney, B. F. Bache, Stephen Girard, George Logan, Cadwalader Morris, and others of the most distinguished residents of the city. Doubtless the French example and party zeal somewhat heated their imaginations, and they took strong ground concerning the pending European struggle. They resolved to use no address save that of “Citizen,” to suppress the polite formulas of ordinary correspondence, and to date their letters from the 4th of July, 1776. Rittenhouse had no participation in these grave trifles, and increasing infirmities having prevented him from attending the meetings, he within a year resigned the presidency. He did not withdraw, however, in time to save his reputation from political attack, and Cobbett, the porcupine, as he called himself, of the day, says, fiercely: “This Rittenhouse was an atheist. . . . . How much he received a year from France is not precisely known. The American Philosophical Society is composed of a nest of such wretches as hardly ever met together before; it is impossible to find words to describe their ignorance or their baseness.” Later generations of men have not been prone to look at the French Revolution through the lens of Burke, and the fact that the Democratic party came into power at the close of the administration of John Adams did much to whiten the work of the earlier Democratic societies, and to make it appear that Rittenhouse and his friends had only been a little in advance of the current.
The few remaining years of his life were spent in
