How are you all this morning? Sick, weak, faint, in pain, or pretty well
recovered? By this time, you are well acquainted with the small-pox.
Pray, how do you like it?
We have no news. It is very hard that half a dozen or half a score
armies can't supply us with news. We have a famine, a perfect dearth of
this necessary article. I am, at this present writing, perplexed and
plagued with two knotty problems in politics. You love to pick a
political bone. So I will even throw it to you.
If a confederation should take place, one great question is, how we
shall vote. Whether each colony shall count one; or whether each shall
have a weight in proportion to its number, or wealth, or exports and
imports, or a compound ratio of all. Another is, whether Congress shall
have authority to limit the dimensions of each colony, to prevent those,
which claim by charter, or proclamation, or commission to the south sea,
from growing too great and powerful, so as to be dangerous to the rest?
Shall I write you a sheet upon each of these questions? When you are
well enough to read, and I can find leisure enough to write, perhaps I
may.
Gerry carried with him a canister for you. But he is an old bachelor,
and what is worse, a politician, and what is worse still, a kind of
soldier; so that I suppose he will have so much curiosity to see armies
and fortifications, and assemblies, that you will lose many a fine
breakfast at a time when you want them most.
Tell Betsey that this same Gerry is such another as herself, sex
excepted. How is my brother and friend Cranch? How is his other self and
their little selves, and ours? Don't be in the dumps, above all things.
I am hard put to it to keep out of them, when I look at home. But I will
be gay if I can. Adieu.