Priestley ought to have told us that Pythagoras passed twenty years in

his travels in India, in Egypt, in Chaldea, perhaps in Sodom and Gomorrah,

Tyre and Sydon. He ought to have told us that in India he conversed with

the Brahmins, and read the Shasta, five thousand years old, written in

the language of the sacred Sansosistes, with the elegance and sentiments

of Plato. Where is to be found theology more orthodox, or philosophy more

profound, than in the introduction to the Shasta? "God is one creator

of all universal sphere, without beginning, without end. God governs all

the creation by a general providence, resulting from his eternal designs.

Search not the essence and the nature of the eternal, who is one; your

research will be vain and presumptuous. It is enough that, day by day,

and night by night, you adore his power, his wisdom and his goodness,

in his works. The eternal willed in the fullness of time, to communicate

of his essence and of his splendor, to beings capable of perceiving it.

They as yet existed not. The eternal willed and they were. He created

Birma, Vitsnou and Siv." These doctrines, sublime, if ever there were

any sublime, Pythagoras learned in India, and taught them to Zaleucus

and his other disciples. He there learned also his Metempsychosis, but

this never was popular, never made much progress in Greece or Italy,

or any other country besides India and Tartary, the region of the grand

immortal Lama. And how does this differ from the possessions of demons

in Greece and Rome? from the demon of Socrates? from the worship of cows

and crocodiles in Egypt and elsewhere?

After migrating through various animals, from elephants to serpents,

according to their behavior, souls that at last behaved well, became

men and women, and then if they were good, they went to heaven.

All ended in heaven, if they became virtuous. Who can wonder at the widow

of Malabar? Where is the lady, who, if her faith were without doubt that

she should go to heaven with her husband on the one, or migrate into

a toad or a wasp on the other, would not lay down on the pile, and set

fire to the fuel?

Modifications and disguises of the Metempsychosis, has crept into Egypt,

and Greece, and Rome, and other countries. Have you read Farmer on the

Dæmons and possessions of the New Testament? According to the Shasta,

Moisasor, with his companions, rebelled against the eternal, and were

precipitated down to Ondoro, the region of darkness.

Do you know anything of the Prophecy of Enoch? Can you give me a comment

on the 6th, the 9th, the 14th verses of the epistle of Jude?

If I am not weary of writing, I am sure you must be of reading such

incoherent rattle. I will not persecute you so severely in future, if

I can help it.

So farewell.

TO THOMAS LIEPER.

MONTICELLO, January 1, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--I had hoped, when I retired from the business of the world,

that I should have been permitted to pass the evening of life in

tranquillity, undisturbed by the peltings and passions of which the

public papers are the vehicles. I see, however, that I have been dragged

into the newspapers by the infidelity of one with whom I was formerly

intimate, but who has abandoned the American principles out of which that

intimacy grew, and become the bigoted partisan of England, and malcontent

of his own government. In a letter which he wrote to me, he earnestly

besought me to avail our country of the good understanding which existed

between the executive and myself, by recommending an offer of such terms

to our enemy as might produce a peace, towards which he was confident

that enemy was disposed. In my answer, I stated the aggressions, the

insults and injuries, which England had been heaping on us for years,

our long forbearance in the hope she might be led by time and reflection

to a sounder view of her own interests, and of their connection with

justice to us, the repeated propositions for accommodation made by us and

rejected by her, and at length her Prince Regent's solemn proclamation

to the world that he would never repeal the orders in council _as to

us_, until France should have revoked her illegal decrees _as to all

the world_, and her minister's declaration to ours, that no admissible

precaution against the impressment of our seamen, could be proposed: that

the unavoidable declaration of war which followed these was accompanied

by advances for peace, on terms which no American could dispense with,

made through various channels, and unnoticed and unanswered through any;

but that if he could suggest any other conditions which we ought to

accept, and which had not been repeatedly offered and rejected, I was

ready to be the channel of their conveyance to the government; and, to

show him that neither that attachment to Bonaparte nor French influence,

which they allege eternally without believing it themselves, affected

my mind, I threw in the two little sentences of the printed extract

enclosed in your friendly favor of the 9th ultimo, and exactly these two

little sentences, from a letter of two or three pages, he has thought

proper to publish, naked, alone, and with my name, although other parts

of the letter would have shown that I wished such limits only to the

successes of Bonaparte, as should not prevent his completely closing

Europe against British manufactures and commerce; and thereby reducing

her to just terms of peace with us.

Thus am I situated. I receive letters from all quarters, some from known

friends, some from those who write like friends, on various subjects.

What am I to do? Am I to button myself up in Jesuitical reserve, rudely

declining any answer, or answering in terms so unmeaning as only to

prove my distrust? Must I withdraw myself from all interchange, of

sentiment with the world? I cannot do this. It is at war with my habits

and temper. I cannot act as if all men were unfaithful because some are

so; nor believe that all will betray me, because some do. I had rather

be the victim of occasional infidelities, than relinquish my general

confidence in the honesty of man.

So far as to the breach of confidence which has brought me into the

newspapers, with a view to embroil me with my friends, by a supposed

separation in opinion and principle from them. But it is impossible that

there can be any difference of opinion among us on the two propositions

contained in these two little sentences, when explained, as they were

explained in the context from which they were insulated. That Bonaparte

is an unprincipled tyrant, who is deluging the continent of Europe with

blood, there is not a human being, not even the wife of his bosom,

who does not see: nor can there, I think, be a doubt as to the line

we ought to wish drawn between his successes and those of Alexander.

Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia, and lay thus

at his feet the whole continent of Europe. This done, England would be

but a breakfast; and, although I am free from the visionary fears which

the votaries of England have effected to entertain, because I believe

he cannot effect the conquest of Europe; yet put all Europe into his

hands, and he might spare such a force, to be sent in British ships,

as I would as leave not have to encounter, when I see how much trouble

a handful of British soldiers in Canada has given us. No. It cannot be

to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy.

The true line of interest for us, is, that Bonaparte should be able to

effect the complete exclusion of England from the whole continent of

Europe, in order, as the same letter said, "by this peaceable engine of

constraint, to make her renounce her views of dominion over the ocean,

of permitting no other nation to navigate it but with her license, and

on tribute to her, and her aggressions on the persons of our citizens

who may choose to exercise their right of passing over that element."

And this would be effected by Bonaparte's succeeding so far as to close

the Baltic against her. This success I wished him the last year, this

I wish him this year; but were he again advanced to Moscow, I should

again wish him such disasters as would prevent his reaching Petersburg.

And were the consequences even to be the longer continuance of our war,

I would rather meet them than see the whole force of Europe wielded by

a single hand.

I have gone into this explanation, my friend, because I know you will

not carry my letter to the newspapers, and because I am willing to trust

to your discretion the explaining me to our honest fellow laborers,

and the bringing them to pause and reflect, if any of them have not

sufficiently reflected on the extent of the success we ought to wish to

Bonaparte, with a view to our own interests only; and even were we not

men, to whom nothing human should be indifferent. But is our particular

interest to make us insensible to all sentiments of morality? Is it

then become criminal, the moral wish that the torrents of blood this

man is shedding in Europe, the sufferings of so many human beings, good

as ourselves, on whose necks he is trampling, the burnings of ancient

cities, devastations of great countries, the destruction of law and

order, and demoralization of the world, should be arrested, even if it

should place our peace a little further distant? No. You and I cannot

differ in wishing that Russia, and Sweden, and Denmark, and Germany,

and Spain, and Portugal, and Italy, and even England, may retain their

independence. And if we differ in our opinions about Towers and his

four beasts and ten kingdoms, we differ as friends, indulging mutual

errors, and doing justice to mutual sincerity and honesty. In this spirit

of sincere confidence and affection, I pray God to bless you here and

hereafter.

TO DOCTOR WALTER JONES.

MONTICELLO, January 2, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--Your favor of November the 25th reached this place December the

21st, having been near a month on the way. How this could happen I know

not, as we have two mails a week both from Fredericksburg and Richmond.

It found me just returned from a long journey and absence, during which

so much business had accumulated, commanding the first attentions, that

another week has been added to the delay.

I deplore, with you, the putrid state into which our newspapers have

passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those

who write for them; and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of

a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which

we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste,

and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information, and

a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless, by

forfeiting all title to belief. That this has, in a great degree, been

produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit, I agree with you;

and I have read with great pleasure the paper you enclosed me on that

subject, which I now return. It is at the same time a perfect model of

the style of discussion which candor and decency should observe, of the

tone which renders difference of opinion even amiable, and a succinct,

correct, and dispassionate history of the origin and progress of party

among us. It might be incorporated as it stands, and without changing a

word, into the history of the present epoch, and would give to posterity

a fairer view of the times than they will probably derive from other

sources. In reading it with great satisfaction, there was but a single

passage where I wished a little more development of a very sound and

catholic idea; a single intercalation to rest it solidly on true bottom.

It is near the end of the first page, where you make a statement of

genuine republican maxims; saying, "that the people ought to possess as

much political power as can possibly exist with the order and security of

society." Instead of this, I would say, "that the people, being the only

safe depository of power, should exercise in person every function which

their qualifications enable them to exercise, consistently with the order

and security of society; that we now find them equal to the election of

those who shall be invested with their executive and legislative powers,

and to act themselves in the judiciary, as judges in questions of fact;

that the range of their powers ought to be enlarged," &c. This gives

both the reason and exemplication of the maxim you express, "that they

ought to possess as much political power," &c. I see nothing to correct

either in your facts or principles.

You say that in taking General Washington on your shoulders, to bear him

harmless through the federal coalition, you encounter a perilous topic.

I do not think so. You have given the genuine history of the course of

his mind through the trying scenes in which it was engaged, and of the

seductions by which it was deceived, but not depraved. I think I knew

General Washington intimately and thoroughly; and were I called on to

delineate his character, it should be in terms like these.

His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order;

his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon,

or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow

in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in

conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he

derived from councils of war, where hearing all suggestions, he selected

whatever was best; and certainly no General ever planned his battles

more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any

member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in

re-adjustment. The consequence was, that he often failed in the field,

and rarely against an enemy in station, as at Boston and York. He was

incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern.

Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting

until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed;

refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with

his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his

justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or

consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision.

He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great

man. His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection

and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If

ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.

In his expenses he was honorable, but exact; liberal in contributions to

whatever promised utility; but frowning and unyielding on all visionary

projects, and all unworthy calls on his charity. His heart was not warm

in its affections; but he exactly calculated every man's value, and gave

him a solid esteem proportioned to it. His person, you know, was fine,

his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and

noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that

could be seen on horseback. Although in the circle of his friends, where

he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation,

his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither

copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. In public, when called on for

a sudden opinion, he was unready, short and embarrassed. Yet he wrote

readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style. This he had

acquired by conversation with the world, for his education was merely

reading, writing and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at

a later day. His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little,

and that only in agriculture and English history. His correspondence

became necessarily extensive, and, with journalizing his agricultural

proceedings, occupied most of his leisure hours within doors. On the

whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few

points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and

fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in

the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an

everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit, of

leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war,

for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils

through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until

it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train; and of scrupulously

obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military,

of which the history of the world furnishes no other example.

How, then, can it be perilous for you to take such a man on your

shoulders? I am satisfied the great body of republicans think of him as

I do. We were, indeed, dissatisfied with him on his ratification of the

British treaty. But this was short lived. We knew his honesty, the wiles

with which he was encompassed, and that age had already began to relax the

firmness of his purposes; and I am convinced he is more deeply seated in

the love and gratitude of the republicans, than in the Pharisaical homage

of the federal monarchists. For he was no monarchist from preference

of his judgment. The soundness of that gave him correct views of the

rights of man, and his severe justice devoted him to them. He has often

declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment

on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of

liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined

the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop

of his blood in support of it. And these declarations he repeated to me

the oftener and more pointedly, because he knew my suspicions of Colonel

Hamilton's views, and probably had heard from him the same declarations

which I had, to wit, "that the British constitution, with its unequal

representation, corruption and other existing abuses, was the most

perfect government which had ever been established on earth, and that a

reformation of those abuses would make it an impracticable government."

I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the

durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and

inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief

that we must at length end in something like a British constitution,

had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birth-days,

pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character,

calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed

possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the

public mind.

These are my opinions of General Washington, which I would vouch at the

judgment seat of God, having been formed on an acquaintance of thirty

years. I served with him in the Virginia legislature from 1769 to the

Revolutionary war, and again, a short time in Congress, until he left us

to take command of the army. During the war and after it we corresponded

occasionally, and in the four years of my continuance in the office of

Secretary of State, our intercourse was daily, confidential and cordial.

After I retired from that office, great and malignant pains were taken

by our federal monarchists, and not entirely without effect, to make him

view me as a theorist, holding French principles of government, which

would lead infallibly to licentiousness and anarchy. And to this he

listened the more easily, from my known disapprobation of the British

treaty. I never saw him afterwards, or these malignant insinuations

should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as mists before

the sun. I felt on his death, with my countrymen, that "verily a great

man hath fallen this day in Israel."

More time and recollection would enable me to add many other traits of

his character; but why add them to you who knew him well? And I cannot

justify to myself a longer detention of your paper.

_Vale, proprieque tuum, me esse tibi persuadeas._

TO JOHN PINTARD RECORDING SECRETARY OF THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

MONTICELLO, January 9, 1814.

SIR,--I have duly received your favor of December 22d, informing me that

the New York Historical Society had been pleased to elect me an honorary

member of that institution. I am entirely sensible of the honor done me

by this election, and I pray you to become the channel of my grateful

acknowledgments to the society. At this distance, and at my time of life,

I cannot but be conscious how little it will be in my power to further

their establishment, and that I should be but an unprofitable member,

carrying into the institution indeed, my best wishes for its success,

and a readiness to serve it on any occasion which should occur. With

these acknowledgments, be so good as to accept for the society, as well

as for yourself, the assurances of my high respect and consideration.

TO SAMUEL M. BURNSIDE, SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY.

MONTICELLO, January 9, 1814.

SIR,--I have duly received your favor of the 13th of December, informing

me of the institution of the American Antiquarian Society, and expressing

its disposition to honor me with an admission into it, and the request

of my co-operation in the advancement of its objects. No one can be more

sensible of the honor and the favor of these dispositions, and I pray

you to have the goodness to testify to them all the gratitude I feel

on receiving assurances of them. There has been a time of life when I

should have entered into their views with zeal, and with a hope of not

being altogether unuseful. But, now more than septuagenary, retired

from the active scenes and business of life, I am sensible how little

I can contribute to the advancement of the objects of their views; but

I shall certainly, and with great pleasure, embrace any occasion which

shall occur, of rendering them any services in my power. With these

assurances, be so good as to accept for them and for yourself, those of

my high respect and consideration.

TO DOCTOR THOMAS COOPER.

MONTICELLO, January 16, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--Your favor of November 8th, if it was rightly dated, did not

come to hand till December 13th, and being absent on a long journey, it

has remained unanswered till now. The copy of your introductory lecture

was received and acknowledged in my letter of July 12, 1812, with which I

sent you Tracy's first volume on Logic. Your Justinian came safely also,

and I have been constantly meaning to acknowledge it, but I wished, at

the same time, to say something more. I possessed Theopilus', Vinnius'

and Harris' editions, but read over your notes and the _addenda et

corrifenda_, and especially the parallels with the English law, with

great satisfaction and edification. Your edition will be very useful

to our lawyers, some of whom will need the translation as well as the

notes. But what I had wanted to say to you on the subject, was that I

much regret that instead of this work, useful as it may be, you had not

bestowed the same time and research rather on a translation and notes

on Bracton, a work which has never been performed for us, and which I

have always considered as one of the greatest desiderata in the law.

The laws of England, in their progress from the earliest to the present

times, may be likened to the road of a traveller, divided into distinct

stages or resting places, at each of which a review is taken of the

road passed over so far. The first of these was Bracton's _De legibus

Angliæ_; the second, Coke's Institutes; the third, the Abridgment of

the law by Matthew Bacon; and the fourth, Blackstone's Commentaries.

Doubtless there were others before Bracton which have not reached us.

Alfred, in the preface to his laws, says they were compiled from those

of Ina, Offa, and Aethelbert, into which, or rather preceding them, the

clergy have interpolated the 20th, 21st, 22d, 23d and 24th chapters of

Exodus, so as to place Alfred's preface to what was really his, awkwardly

enough in the body of the work. An interpolation the more glaring, as

containing laws expressly contradicted by those of Alfred. This pious

fraud seems to have been first noted by Howard, in his _Contumes Anglo

Normandes_ (188), and the pious judges of England have had no inclination

to question it; [of this disposition in these judges, I could give you

a curious sample from a note in my common-place book, made while I was

a student, but it is too long to be now copied. Perhaps I may give it

to you with some future letter.] This digest of Alfred of the laws of

the Heptarchy into a single code, common to the whole kingdom, by him

first reduced into one, was probably the birth of what is called the

common law. He has been styled, "Magnus Juris Anglicani Conditor;" and

his code, the Dom-Dec, or doom-book. That which was made afterwards

under Edward the Confessor, was but a restoration of Alfred's, with

some intervening alterations. And this was the code which the English

so often, under the Norman princes, petitioned to have restored to them.

But, all records previous to the _Magna Charta_ having been early lost,

Bracton's is the first digest of the whole body of law which has come

down to us entire. What materials for it existed in his time we know

not, except the unauthoritative collections of Lambard & Wilkins, and

the treatise of Glanville, tempore H. 2. Bracton's is the more valuable,

because being written a very few years after the _Magna Charta_, which

commences what is called the statute law, it gives us the state of the

common law in its ultimate form, and exactly at the point of division

between the common and statute law. It is a most able work, complete in

its matter and luminous in its method.

2. The statutes which introduced changes began now to be preserved;

applications of the law to new cases by the courts, began soon after to

be reported in the year-books, these to be methodized and abridged by

Fitzherbert, Broke, Rolle, and others; individuals continued the business

of reporting; particular treatises were written by able men, and all

these, by the time of Lord Coke, had formed so large a mass of matter

as to call for a new digest, to bring it within reasonable compass.

This he undertook in his Institutes, harmonizing all the decisions and

opinions which were reconcilable, and rejecting those not so. This work

is executed with so much learning and judgment, that I do not recollect

that a single position in it has ever been judicially denied. And although

the work loses much of its value by its chaotic form, it may still be

considered as the fundamental code of the English law.

3. The same processes re-commencing of statutory changes, new divisions,

multiplied reports, and special treatises, a new accumulation had formed,

calling for new reduction, by the time of Matthew Bacon. His work,

therefore, although not pretending to the textual merit of Bracton's,

or Coke's, was very acceptable. His alphabetical arrangement, indeed,

although better than Coke's jumble, was far inferior to Bracton's. But it

was a sound digest of the materials existing on the several alphabetical

heads under which he arranged them. His work was not admitted as authority

in Westminster Hall; yet it was the manual of every judge and lawyer,

and, what better proves its worth, has been its daily growth in the

general estimation.

4. A succeeding interval of changes and additions of matter produced

Blackstone's Commentaries, the most lucid in arrangement which had yet

been written, correct in its matter, classical in style, and rightfully

taking its place by the side of the Justinian Institutes. But, like them

it was only an elementary book. It did not present all the subjects of

the law in all their details. It still left it necessary to recur to

the original works of which it was the summary. The great mass of law

books from which it was extracted, was still to be consulted on minute

investigations. It wanted, therefore, a species of merit which entered

deeply into the value of those of Bracton, Coke and Bacon. They had in

effect swept the shelves of all the materials preceding them. To give

Blackstone, therefore, a full measure of value, another work is still

wanting, to-wit: to incorporate with his principles a compend of the

particular cases subsequent to Bacon, of which they are the essence.

This might be done by printing under his text a digest like Bacon's

continued to Blackstone's time. It would enlarge his work, and increase

its value peculiarly to us, because just there we break off from the

parent stem of the English law, unconcerned in any of its subsequent

changes or decisions.

Of the four digests noted, the three last are possessed and understood

by every one. But the first, the fountain of them all, remains in

its technical Latin, abounding in terms antiquated, obsolete, and

unintelligible but to the most learned of the body of lawyers. To give it

to us then in English, with a glossary of its old terms, is a work for

which I know nobody but yourself possessing the necessary learning and

industry. The latter part of it would be furnished to your hand from the

glossaries of Wilkins, Lambard, Spelman, Somner in the X. Scriptores, the

index of Coke and the law dictionaries. Could not such an undertaking be

conveniently associated with your new vocation of giving law lectures?

I pray you to think of it.[8] A further operation indeed, would still be

desirable. To take up the doctrines of Bracton, _separatim et seriatim_,

to give their history through the periods of Lord Coke and Bacon, down

to Blackstone, to show when and how some of them have become extinct,

the successive alterations made in others, and their progress to the

state in which Blackstone found them. But this might be a separate work,

left for your greater leisure or for some future pen.[9]

I have long had under contemplation, and been collecting materials for

the plan of an university in Virginia which should comprehend all the

sciences useful to us, and none others. The general idea is suggested in

the Notes on Virginia, Qu. 14. This would probably absorb the functions

of William and Mary College, and transfer them to a healthier and more

central position: perhaps to the neighborhood of this place. The long and

lingering decline of William and Mary, the death of its last president,

its location and climate, force on us the wish for a new institution

more convenient to our country generally, and better adapted to the

present state of science. I have been told there will be an effort in

the present session of our legislature, to effect such an establishment.

I confess, however, that I have not great confidence that this will

be done. Should it happen, it would offer places worthy of you, and of

which you are worthy. It might produce, too, a bidder for the apparatus

and library of Dr. Priestley, to which they might add mine on their

own terms. This consists of about seven or eight thousand volumes, the

best chosen collection of its size probably in America, and containing

a great mass of what is most rare and valuable, and especially of what

relates to America.

You have given us, in your Emporium, Bollman's medley on Political

Economy. It is the work of one who sees a little of everything, and the

whole of nothing; and were it not for your own notes on it, a sentence

of which throws more just light on the subject than all his pages, we

should regret the place it occupies of more useful matter. The bringing

our countrymen to a sound comparative estimate of the vast value of

internal commerce, and the disproportionate importance of what is foreign,

is the most salutary effort which can be made for the prosperity of

these States, which are entirely misled from their true interests by

the infection of English prejudices, and illicit attachments to English

interests and connections. I look to you for this effort. It would

furnish a valuable chapter for every Emporium; but I would rather see

it also in the newspapers, which alone find access to every one.

Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now

coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper, as

we were formerly by the old Continental paper. It is cruel that such

revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious

adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in

manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument

to burthen all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits,

profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs. Prudent

men must be on their guard in this game of _Robin's alive_, and take

care that the spark does not extinguish in their hands. I am an enemy

to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin. But our

whole country is so fascinated by this Jack-lantern wealth, that they

will not stop short of its total and fatal explosion.[10]

Have you seen the memorial to Congress on the subject of Oliver Evans'

patent rights? The memorialists have published in it a letter of mine

containing some views on this difficult subject. But I have opened it no

further than to raise the questions belonging to it. I wish we could have

the benefit of your lights on these questions. The abuse of the frivolous

patents is likely to cause more inconvenience than is countervailed by

those really useful. We know not to what uses we may apply implements

which have been in our hands before the birth of our government, and

even the discovery of America. The memorial is a thin pamphlet, printed

by Robinson of Baltimore, a copy of which has been laid on the desk of

every member of Congress.

You ask if it is a secret who wrote the commentary on Montesquieu? It

must be a secret during the author's life. I may only say at present that

it was written by a Frenchman, that the original MS. in French is now

in my possession, that it was translated and edited by General Duane,

and that I should rejoice to see it printed in its original tongue,

if any one would undertake it. No book can suffer more by translation,

because of the severe correctness of the original in the choice of its

terms. I have taken measures for securing to the author his justly-earned

fame, whenever his death or other circumstances may render it safe for

him. Like you, I do not agree with him in everything, and have had some

correspondence with him on particular points. But on the whole, it is a

most valuable work, one which I think will form an epoch in the science

of government, and which I wish to see in the hands of every American

student, as the elementary and fundamental institute of that important

branch of human science.[11]

I have never seen the answer of Governor Strong to the judges of

Massachusetts, to which you allude, nor the Massachusetts reports in

which it is contained. But I am sure you join me in lamenting the general

defection of lawyers and judges, from the free principles of government.

I am sure they do not derive this degenerate spirit from the father of

our science, Lord Coke. But it may be the reason why they cease to read

him, and the source of what are now called "Blackstone lawyers."

Go on in all your good works, without regard to the eye "of suspicion

and distrust with which you may be viewed by some," and without being

weary in well doing, and be assured that you are justly estimated by

the impartial mass of our fellow citizens, and by none more than myself.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] [Bracton has at length been translated in England.]

[9] [This has been done by Reeves, in his History of the Law.]

[10] [This accordingly took place four years after.]

[11] [The original has since been published in France, with

the name of its author, M. de Tutt Tracy.]

TO OLIVER EVANS, ESQ.

MONTICELLO, January 16, 1814.

SIR,--In August last I received a letter from Mr. Isaac McPherson of

Baltimore, on the controversies subsisting between yourself and some

persons in that quarter interested in mills. These related to your

patent rights for the elevators, conveyors, and hopper-boys; and he

requested any information I could give him on that subject. Having

been formerly a member of the patent board, as long as it existed,

and bestowed in the execution of that trust much consideration on the

questions belonging to it, I thought it an act of justice, and indeed

of duty, to communicate such facts and principles as had occurred to me

on the subject. I therefore wrote the letter of August 13, which is the

occasion of your favor to me of the 7th instant, just now received, but

without the report of the case tried in the circuit court of Maryland,

or your memorial to Congress, mentioned in the letter as accompanying

it. You request an answer to your letter, which my respect and esteem

for you would of themselves have dictated; but I am not certain that I

distinguish the particular points to which you wish a specific answer.

You agree in the letter, that the chain of buckets and Archimedes screw

are old inventions; that every one had, and still has, a right to use

them and the hopper-boy, if that also existed previously, in the forms

and constructions known before your patent; and that, therefore, you have

neither a grant nor claim, to the exclusive right of using elevators,

conveyors, hopper-boys, or drills, but only of the improved elevator,

the improved hopper-boy, &c. In this, then, we are entirely agreed,

and your right to your own improvements in the construction of these

machines is explicitly recognized in my letter. I think, however, that

your letter claims something more, although it is not so explicitly

defined as to convey to my mind the precise idea which you perhaps meant

to express. Your letter says that your patent is for your improvement in

the manufacture of flour by the application of certain principles, and of

such machinery as will carry those principles into operation, whether of

the improved elevator, improved hopper-boy, or (without being confined to

them) of any machinery known and free to the public. I can conceive how a

machine may improve the manufacture of flour; but not how a _principle_

abstracted from any machine can do it. It must then be the machine, and

the principle of that machine, which is secured to you by your patent.

Recurring now to the words of your definition, do they mean that, while

all are free to use the old string of buckets, and Archimedes' screw for

the purposes to which they had been formerly applied, you alone have the

exclusive right to apply them to the manufacture of flour? that no one

has a right to apply his old machines to all the purposes of which they

are susceptible? that every one, for instance, who can apply the hoe,

the spade, or the axe to any purpose to which they have not been before

applied, may have a patent for the exclusive right to that application?

and may exclude all others, under penalties, from so using their hoe,

spade, or axe? If this be the meaning, my opinion that the legislature

never meant by the patent law to sweep away so extensively the rights

of their constituents, to environ everything they touch with snares,

is expressed in the letter of August 13, from which I have nothing to

retract, nor ought to add but the observation that if a new application

of our old machines be a ground of monopoly, the patent law will take

from us much more good than it will give. Perhaps it may mean another

thing, that while every one has a right to the distinct and separate use

of the buckets, the screw, the hopper-boy, in their old forms, the patent

gives you the exclusive right to combine their uses on the same object.

But if we have a right to use three things separately, I see nothing in

reason, or in the patent law, which forbids our using them all together.

A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane separately; may he not

combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his

knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him

the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead

of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully

abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things

we have.

I have no particular interest, however, in these questions, nor any

inclination to be the advocate of either party; and I hope I shall be

excused from it. I shall acquiesce cheerfully in the decisions in your

favor by those to whom the laws have confided them, without blaming

the other party for being unwilling, when so new a branch of science

has been recently engrafted on our jurisprudence, one with which its

professors have till now had no call to make themselves acquainted, one

bearing little analogy to their professional educations or pursuits. That

they should be unwilling, I say, to admit that one or two decisions,

before inferior and local tribunals, before the questions shall have

been repeatedly and maturely examined in all their bearings, before

the cases shall have presented themselves in all their forms and

attitudes, before a sanction by the greater part of the judges on the

most solemn investigations, and before the industry and intelligence

of many defendants may have excited to efforts for the vindication of

the general rights of the citizen; that one or other of the precedents

should forever foreclose the whole of a new subject.

To the publication of this answer with your letter, as you request, I have

no objection. I wish right to be done to all parties, and to yourself,

particularly and personally, the just rewards of genius; and I tender

you the assurances of my great esteem and respect.

TO JOSEPH C. CABELL, ESQ.

MONTICELLO, January 17, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--In your last letter to me you expressed a desire to look into

the question whether, by the laws of nature, one generation of men can,

by any act of theirs, bind those which are to follow them? I say, by the

laws of nature, there being between generation and generation, as between

nation and nation, no other obligatory law; and you requested to see

what I had said on the subject to Mr. Eppes. I enclose, _for your own

perusal_, therefore, three letters which I wrote to him on the course of

our finances, which embrace the question before stated. When I wrote the

first, I had no thought of following it by a second. I was led to that by

his subsequent request, and after the second I was induced, in a third,

to take up the subject of banks, by the communication of a proposition to

be laid before Congress for the establishment of a new bank. I mention

this to explain the total absence of order in these letters as a whole.

I have said above that they are sent for _your own perusal_, not meaning

to debar any use of the matter, but only that my name may in nowise be

connected with it. I am too desirous of tranquillity to bring such a

nest of hornets on me as the fraternities of banking companies, and this

infatuation of banks is a torrent which it would be a folly for me to

get into the way of. I see that it must take its course, until actual

ruin shall awaken us from its delusions. Until the gigantic banking

propositions of this winter had made their appearance in the different

legislatures, I had hoped that the evil might still be checked; but I

see now that it is desperate, and that we must fold our arms and go to

the bottom with the ship. I had been in hopes that good old Virginia, not

yet so far embarked as her northern sisters, would have set the example

this winter, of beginning the process of cure, by passing a law that,

after a certain time, suppose of six months, no bank bill of less than

ten dollars should be permitted. That after some other reasonable term,

there should be none less than twenty dollars, and so on, until those

only should be left in circulation whose size would be above the common

transactions of any but merchants. This would ensure to us an ordinary

circulation of metallic money, and would reduce the quantum of paper

within the bounds of moderate mischief. And it is the only way in which

the reduction can be made without a shock to private fortunes. A sudden

stoppage of this trash, either by law or its own worthlessness, would

produce confusion and ruin. Yet this will happen by its own extinction, if

left to itself. Whereas, by a salutary interposition of the legislature,

it may be withdrawn insensibly and safely. Such a mode of doing it, too,

would give less alarm to the bank-holders, the discreet part of whom must

wish to see themselves secured by some circumscription. It might be asked

what we should do for change? The banks must provide it, first to pay

off their five-dollar bills, next their ten-dollar bills and so on, and

they ought to provide it to lessen the evils of their institution. But

I now give up all hope. After producing the same revolutions in private

fortunes as the old Continental paper did, it will die like that, adding

a total incapacity to raise resources for the war.

Withdrawing myself within the shell of our own State, I have long

contemplated a division of it into hundreds or wards, as the most

fundamental measure for securing good government, and for instilling

the principles and exercise of self-government into every fibre of every

member of our commonwealth. But the details are too long for a letter, and

must be the subject of conversation, whenever I shall have the pleasure

of seeing you. It is for some of you young legislators to immortalize

yourselves by laying this stone as the basis of our political edifice.

I must ask the favor of an early return of the enclosed papers, of which

I have no copy. Ever affectionately yours.

TO MR. R. M. PATTERSON, SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

MONTICELLO, January 20, 1814.

SIR,--I have duly received your favor of the 7th, informing me that the

American Philosophical Society, at their meeting of that day, had been

pleased unanimously to elect me as President of the Society. I receive

with just sensibility this proof of their continued good will, and pray

you to assure them of my gratitude for these favors, of my devotedness

to their service, and the pleasure with which at all times I should in

any way be made useful to them.

For yourself be pleased to accept the assurance of my great esteem and

respect.

TO PRESIDENT ADAMS.

MONTICELLO, January 24, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--I have great need of the indulgence so kindly extended to me

in your favor of December 25, of permitting me to answer your friendly

letters at my leisure. My frequent and long absences from home are a first

cause of tardiness in my correspondence, and a second the accumulation

of business during my absence, some of which imperiously commands first

attentions. I am now in arrear to you for your letters of November 12,

14, 16, December 3, 19, 25.

* * * * *

You ask me if I have ever seen the work of I. W. Goethen's Schriften?

Never; nor did the question ever occur to me before where get we the ten

commandments? The book indeed gives them to us verbatim, but where did

it get them? For itself tells us they were written by the finger of God

on tables of stone, which were destroyed by Moses; it specifies those

on the second set of tables in different form and substance, but still

without saying how the others were recovered. But the whole history of

these books is so defective and doubtful, that it seems vain to attempt

minute inquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text,

and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right

from that cause to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.

In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have

proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the

fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as

to pick out diamonds from dunghills. The matter of the first was such

as would be preserved in the memory of the hearers, and handed on by

tradition for a long time; the latter such stuff as might be gathered up,

for imbedding it, anywhere, and at any time. I have nothing of Vives, or

Budæus, and little of Erasmus. If the familiar histories of the Saints,

the want of which they regret, would have given us the histories of those

tricks which these writers acknowledge to have been practised, and of the

lies they agree have been invented for the sake of religion, I join them

in their regrets. These would be the only parts of their histories worth

reading. It is not only the sacred volumes they have thus interpolated,

gutted, and falsified, but the works of others relating to them, and

even the laws of the land. We have a curious instance of one of these

pious frauds in the laws of Alfred. He composed, you know, from the laws

of the Heptarchy, a digest for the government of the United Kingdom,

and in his preface to that work he tells us expressly the sources from

which he drew it, to wit, the laws of Ina, of Offa and Aethelbert, (not

naming the Pentateuch.) But his pious interpolator, very awkwardly,

_premises_ to his work four chapters of Exodus (from the 20th to the

23d) as a part of the laws of the land; so that Alfred's _preface_ is

made to stand in the body of the work. Our judges too have lent a ready

hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of

their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of

municipal law to the dogmas of their religion, by declaring that these

make a part of the law of the land. In the Year-Book 34, H. 6, p. 38, in

Quære impedit, where the question was how far the common law takes notice

of the ecclesiastical law, Prisot, Chief Justice, in the course of his

argument, says, "a tiels leis que ils de seint eglise ont, en _ancien

scripture_, covient a nous a donner credence; car ces common luy sur

quels touts manners leis sont fondes; et auxy, siv, nous sumus obliges

de canustre lour esy de saint eglise," &c. Finch begins the business of

falsification by mistranslating and mistating the words of Prisot thus:

"to such laws of the church as have warrant in _holy scripture_ our law

giveth credence." Citing the above case and the words of Prisot in the

margin, Finch's law, B. 1, c. 3, here then we find _ancien scripture_,

ancient writing, translated "holy scripture." This, Wingate, in 1658,

erects into a maxim of law in the very words of Finch, but citing Prisot

and not Finch. And Sheppard, tit. Religion, in 1675 laying it down in

the same words of Finch, quotes the Year-Book, Finch and Wingate. Then

comes Sir Matthew Hale, in the case of the King _v._ Taylor, 1 Ventr.

293, 3 Keb. 607, and declares that "Christianity is part and parcel of

the laws of England." Citing nobody, and resting it, with his judgment

against the witches, on his own authority, which indeed was sound and

good in all cases into which no superstition or bigotry could enter.

Thus strengthened, the court in 1728, in the King _v._ Woolston, would

not suffer it to be questioned whether to write against Christianity

was punishable at common law, saying it had been so settled by Hale in

Taylor's case, 2 Stra. 834. Wood, therefore, 409, without scruple, lays

down as a principle, that all blaspheming and profaneness are offences

at the common law, and cites Strange. Blackstone, in 1763, repeats, in

the words of Sir Matthew Hale, that "Christianity is part of the laws of

England," citing Ventris and Strange, _ubi supra_. And Lord Mansfield,

in the case of the Chamberlain of London _v._ Evans, in 1767, qualifying

somewhat the position, says that "the essential principles of revealed

religion are part of the common law." Thus we find this string of

authorities all hanging by one another on a single hook, a mistranslation

by Finch of the words of Prisot, or on nothing. For all quote Prisot,

or one another, or nobody. Thus Finch misquotes Prisot; Wingate also,

but using Finch's words; Sheppard quotes Prisot, Finch and Wingate;

Hale cites nobody; the court in Woolston's case cite Hale; Wood cites

Woolston's case; Blackstone that and Hale, and Lord Mansfield volunteers

his own _ipse dixit_. And who now can question but that the whole Bible

and Testament are a part of the common law? And that Connecticut, in her

blue laws, laying it down as a principle that the laws of God should be

the laws of their land, except where their own contradicted them, did

anything more than express, with a salvo, what the English judges had

less cautiously declared without any restriction? And what, I dare say,

our cunning Chief Justice would swear to, and find as many sophisms to

twist it out of the general terms of our declarations of rights, and

even the stricter text of the Virginia "act for the freedom of religion,"

as he did to twist Burr's neck out of the halter of treason. May we not

say then with him who was all candor and benevolence, "woe unto you, ye

lawyers, for ye lade men with burthens grievous to bear."

I think with you, that Priestley, in his comparison of the doctrines

of philosophy and revelation, did not do justice to the undertaking.

But he felt himself pressed by the hand of death. Enfield has given us

a more distinct account of the ethics of the ancient philosophers; but

the great work of which Enfield's is an abridgment, Brucker's History of

Philosophy, is the treasure which I would wish to possess, as a book of

reference or of special research only, for who could read six volumes

quarto, of one thousand pages each, closely printed, of modern Latin?

Your account of D'Argens' Œileus makes me wish for him also. Œileus

furnishes a fruitful text for a sensible and learned commentator. The

Abbé Batteaux, which I have, is a meagre thing.

You surprise me with the account you give of the strength of family

distinction still existing in your State. With us it is so totally

extinguished, that not a spark of it is to be found but lurking in the

hearts of some of our old tories; but all bigotries hang to one another,

and this in the Eastern States hangs, as I suspect, to that of the

priesthood. Here youth, beauty, mind and manners, are more valued than

a pedigree.

I do not remember the conversation between us which you mention in yours

of November 15th, on your proposition to vest in Congress the exclusive

power of establishing banks. My opposition to it must have been grounded,

not on taking the power from the States, but on leaving any vestige of

it in existence, even in the hands of Congress; because it would only

have been a change of the organ of abuse. I have ever been the enemy of

banks, not of those discounting for cash, but of those foisting their

own paper into circulation, and thus banishing our cash. My zeal against

those institutions was so warm and open at the establishment of the Bank

of the United States, that I was derided as a maniac by the tribe of

bank-mongers, who were seeking to filch from the public their swindling

and barren gains. But the errors of that day cannot be recalled. The evils

they have engendered are now upon us, and the question is how we are to

get out of them? Shall we build an altar to the old paper money of the

revolution, which ruined individuals but saved the republic, and burn

on that all the bank charters, present and future, and their notes with

them? For these are to ruin both republic and individuals. This cannot

be done. The mania is too strong. It has seized, by its delusions and

corruptions, all the members of our governments, general, special and

individual. Our circulating paper of the last year was estimated at two

hundred millions of dollars. The new banks now petitioned for, to the

several legislatures, are for about sixty millions additional capital,

and of course one hundred and eighty millions of additional circulation,

nearly doubling that of the last year, and raising the whole mass to

near four hundred millions, or forty for one, of the wholesome amount of

circulation for a population of eight millions circumstanced as we are,

and you remember how rapidly our money went down after our forty for one

establishment in the revolution. I doubt if the present trash can hold as

long. I think the three hundred and eighty millions must blow all up in

the course of the present year, or certainly it will be consummated by

the re-duplication to take place of course at the legislative meetings

of the next winter. Should not prudent men, who possess stock in any

monied institution, either draw and hoard the cash now while they can, or

exchange it for canal stock, or such other as being bottomed on immovable

property, will remain unhurt by the crush? I have been endeavoring to

persuade a friend in our legislature to try and save this State from the

general ruin by timely interference. I propose to him, First, to prohibit

instantly, all foreign paper. Secondly, to give our banks six months to

call in all their five-dollar bills (the lowest we allow); another six

months to call in their ten-dollar notes, and six months more to call

in all below fifty dollars. This would produce so gradual a diminution

of medium, as not to shock contracts already made--would leave finally,

bills of such size as would be called for only in transactions between

merchant and merchant, and ensure a metallic circulation for those of

the mass of citizens. But it will not be done. You might as well, with

the sailors, whistle to the wind, as suggest precautions against having

too much money. We must bend then before the gale, and try to hold fast

ourselves by some plank of the wreck. God send us all a safe deliverance,

and to yourself every other species and degree of happiness.

P. S. I return your letter of November 15th, as it requests, and supposing

that the late publication of the life of our good and really great

Rittenhouse may not have reached you, I send a copy for your acceptance.

Even its episodes and digressions may add to the amusement it will furnish

you. But if the history of the world were written on the same scale,

the whole world would not hold it. Rittenhouse, as an astronomer, would

stand on a line with any of his time, and as a mechanician, he certainly

has not been equalled. In this view he was truly great; but, placed

along side of Newton, every human character must appear diminutive, and

none would have shrunk more feelingly from the painful parallel than

the modest and amiable Rittenhouse, whose genius and merit are not the

less for this exaggerated comparison of his over zealous biographer.

TO MR. JOHN CLARKE.

MONTICELLO, January 27, 1814.

SIR,--Your favor of December 2d came to hand some time ago, and I perceive

in it the proofs of a mind worthily occupied on the best interests of our

common country. To carry on our war with success, we want _able_ officers,

and a sufficient number of soldiers. The former, time and trial can alone

give us; to procure the latter, we need only the tender of sufficient

inducements and the assiduous pressure of them on the proper subjects.

The inducement of interest proposed by you, is undoubtedly the principal

one on which any reliance can be placed, and the assiduous pressure of

it on the proper subjects would probably be better secured by making it

the interest and the duty of a given portion of the militia, rather than

that of a mere recruiting officer. Whether, however, it is the best mode,

belongs to the decision of others; but, satisfied that it is one of the

good ones, I forwarded your letter to a member of the government, who

will make it a subject of consideration by those with whom the authority

rests. Whether the late discomfiture of Bonaparte will have the effect

of shortening or lengthening our war, is uncertain. It is cruel that we

should have been forced to wish any success to such a destroyer of the

human race. Yet while it was our interest and that of humanity that he

should not subdue Russia, and thus lay all Europe at his feet, it was

desirable to us that he should so far succeed as to close the Baltic to

our enemy, and force him, by the pressure of internal distress, into a

disposition to return to the paths of justice towards us. If the French

nation stand by Bonaparte, he may rally, rise again, and yet give Great

Britain so much employment as to give time for a just settlement of our

questions with her. We must patiently wait the solution of this doubt

by time. Accept the assurances of my esteem and respect.

TO MR. SAMUEL GREENHOW.

MONTICELLO, January 31, 1814.

SIR,--Your letter on the subject of the Bible Society arrived here while

I was on a journey to Bedford, which occasioned a long absence from

home. Since my return, it has lain, with a mass of others accumulated

during my absence, till I could answer them. I presume the views of the

society are confined to our own country, for with the religion of other

countries my own forbids intermeddling. I had not supposed there was a

family in this State not possessing a Bible, and wishing without having

the means to procure one. When, in earlier life, I was intimate with

every class, I think I never was in a house where that was the case.

However, circumstances may have changed, and the society, I presume,

have evidence of the fact. I therefore enclose you cheerfully, an order

on Messrs. Gibson & Jefferson for fifty dollars, for the purposes of the

society, sincerely agreeing with you that there never was a more pure

and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in

the four evangelists. Accept the assurance of my esteem and respect.

TO JOSEPH C. CABELL.

MONTICELLO, January 31, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--Your favor of the 23d is received. Say had come to hand safely.

But I regretted having asked the return of him; for I did not find in

him one new idea upon the subject I had been contemplating; nothing more

than a succinct, judicious digest of the tedious pages of Smith.

You ask my opinion on the question, whether the States can add any

qualifications to those which the constitution has prescribed for their

members of Congress? It is a question I had never before reflected on;

yet had taken up an off-hand opinion, agreeing with your first, that they

could not; that to add new qualifications to those of the constitution,

would be as much an alteration as to detract from them. And so I think

the House of Representatives of Congress decided in some case; I believe

that of a member from Baltimore. But your letter having induced me to

look into the constitution, and to consider the question a little, I

am again in your predicament, of doubting the correctness of my first

opinion. Had the constitution been silent, nobody can doubt but that the

right to prescribe all the qualifications and disqualifications of those

they would send to represent them, would have belonged to the State. So

also the constitution might have prescribed the whole, and excluded all

others. It seems to have preferred the middle way. It has exercised the

power in part, by declaring some disqualifications, to wit, those of not

being twenty-five years of age, of not having been a citizen seven years,

and of not being an inhabitant of the State at the time of election. But

it does not declare, itself, that the member shall not be a lunatic, a

pauper, a convict of treason, of murder, of felony, or other infamous

crime, or a non-resident of his district; nor does it prohibit to the

State the power of declaring these, or any other disqualifications which

its particular circumstances may call for; and these may be different in

different States. Of course, then, by the tenth amendment, the power is

reserved to the State. If, wherever the constitution assumes a single

power out of many which belong to the same subject, we should consider

it as assuming the whole, it would vest the General Government with a

mass of powers never contemplated. On the contrary, the assumption of

particular powers seems an exclusion of all not assumed. This reasoning

appears to me to be sound; but, on so recent a change of view, caution

requires us not to be too confident, and that we admit this to be one

of the doubtful questions on which honest men may differ with the purest

motives; and the more readily, as we find we have differed from ourselves

on it.

I have always thought that where the line of demarcation between the

powers of the General and the State governments was doubtfully or

indistinctly drawn, it would be prudent and praiseworthy in both parties,

never to approach it but under the most urgent necessity. Is the necessity

now urgent, to declare that no non-resident of his district shall be

eligible as a member of Congress? It seems to me that, in practice,

the partialities of the people are a sufficient security against such

an election; and that if, in any instance, they should ever choose a

non-resident, it must be one of such eminent merit and qualifications,

as would make it a good, rather than an evil; and that, in any event,

the examples will be so rare, as never to amount to a serious evil. If

the case then be neither clear nor urgent, would it not be better to let

it lie undisturbed? Perhaps its decision may never be called for. But if

it be indispensable to establish this disqualification now, would it not

look better to declare such others, at the same time, as may be proper?

I frankly confide to yourself these opinions, or rather no-opinions, of

mine; but would not wish to have them go any farther. I want to be quiet;

and although some circumstances, now and then, excite me to notice them,

I feel safe, and happier in leaving events to those whose turn it is

to take care of them; and, in general, to let it be understood, that I

meddle little or not at all with public affairs. There are two subjects,

indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe,

the public education, and the sub division of counties into wards. I

consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging

on these two hooks. Of the first, you will, I am sure, be an advocate,

as having already reflected on it, and of the last, when you shall have

reflected. Ever affectionately yours.

TO THOMAS COOPER, ESQ.

MONTICELLO, February 10, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--In my letter of January 16, I promised you a sample from my

common-place book, of the pious disposition of the English judges, to

connive at the frauds of the clergy, a disposition which has even rendered

them faithful allies in practice. When I was a student of the law, now

half a century ago, after getting through Coke Littleton, whose matter

cannot be abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and common-placing

what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on

the subject. I now enclose you the extract from these entries which

I promised. They were written at a time of life when I was bold in

the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to

whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in

their way. This must be the apology, if you find the conclusions bolder

than historical facts and principles will warrant. Accept with them the

assurances of my great esteem and respect.

_Common-place Book._

873. In Quare imp. in C. B. 34, H. 6, fo. 38, the def. Br. of Lincoln

pleads that the church of the pl. became void by the death of the

incumbent, that the pl. and J. S. each pretending a right, presented

two several clerks; that the church being thus rendered litigious, he

was not obliged, by the _Ecclesiastical law_ to admit either, until an

inquisition de jure patronatus, in the ecclesiastical court: that, by

the same law, this inquisition was to be at the suit of either claimant,

and was not _ex-officio_ to be instituted by the bishop, and at his

proper costs; that neither party had desired such an inquisition; that

six months passed whereon it belonged to him of right to present as

on a lapse, which he had done. The pl. demurred. A question was, How

far the _Ecclesiastical law_ was to be respected in this matter by the

common law court? and Prisot C. 3, in the course of his argument uses

this expression, "A tiels leis que ils de seint eglise ont en _ancien

scripture_, covient a nous a donner credence, car ces common ley sur

quel touts manners leis sont fondés: et auxy, sin, nous sumus obligès de

conustre nostre ley; et, sin, si poit apperer or á nous que liévesque ad

fait comme un ordinary fera en tiel cas, adong nous devons ces adjuger

bon autrement nemy," &c. It does not appear that judgment was given. Y.

B. ubi supra. S. C. Fitzh. abr. Qu. imp. 89. Bro. abr. Qu. imp. 12. Finch

mistakes this in the following manner: "To such laws of the church as

have warrant in _Holy Scripture_, our law giveth credence," and cites

the above case, and the words of Prisot on the margin. Finch's law.

B. 1, ch. 3, published 1613. Here we find "ancien scripture" [_ancient

writing_] converted into "Holy Scripture," whereas it can only mean the

_ancient written_ laws of the church. It cannot mean the Scriptures, 1,

because the "ancien scripture" must then be understood to mean the "Old

Testament" or Bible, in opposition to the "New Testament," and to the

exclusion of that, which would be absurd and contrary to the wish of those

who cite this passage to prove that the Scriptures, or Christianity, is

a part of the common law. 2. Because Prisot says, "Ceo [est] common

ley, sur quel touts manners leis sont fondés." Now, it is true that the

ecclesiastical law, so far as admitted in England, derives its authority

from the common law. But it would not be true that the Scriptures so

derive their authority. 3. The whole case and arguments show that the

question was how far the Ecclesiastical law in general should be respected

in a common law court. And in Bro. abr. of this case, Littleton says,

"Les juges del common ley prendra conusans quid est _lax ecclesiæ_, vel

admiralitatis, et trujus modi." 4. Because the particular part of the

Ecclesiastical law then in question, to wit, the right of the patron to

present to his advowson, was not founded on the law of God, but subject

to the modification of the lawgiver, and so could not introduce any

such general position as Finch pretends. Yet Wingate [in 1658] thinks

proper to erect this false quotation into a maxim of the common law,

expressing it in the very words of Finch, but citing Prisot, wing. max.

3. Next comes Sheppard, [in 1675,] who states it in the same words of

Finch, and quotes the Year-Book, Finch and Wingate. 3. Shepp. abr. tit.

Religion. In the case of the King _v._ Taylor, Sir Matthew Hale lays it

down in these words, "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England."

1 Ventr. 293, 3 Keb. 607. But he quotes no authority, resting it on his

own, which was good in all cases in which his mind received no bias from

his bigotry, his superstitions, his visions about sorceries, demons,

&c. The power of these over him is exemplified in his hanging of the

witches. So strong was this doctrine become in 1728, by additions and

repetitions from one another, that in the case of the King _v._ Woolston,

the court would not suffer it to be debated, whether to write against

Christianity was punishable in the temporal courts at common law, saying

it had been so settled in Taylor's case, ante 2, stra. 834; therefore,

Wood, in his Institute, lays it down that all blasphemy and profaneness

are offences by the _common law_, and cites Strange ubi supra. Wood 409.

And Blackstone [about 1763] repeats, in the words of Sir Matthew Hale,

that "Christianity is part of the laws of England," citing Ventris and

Strange ubi supra. 4. Blackst. 59. Lord Mansfield qualifies it a little

by saying that "The essential principles of revealed religion are part

of the common law." In the case of the Chamberlain of London _v._ Evans,

1767. But he cites no authority, and leaves us at our peril to find out

what, in the opinion of the judge, and according to the measure of his

foot or his faith, are those essential principles of revealed religion

obligatory on us as a part of the common law.

Thus we find this string of authorities, when examined to the beginning,

all hanging on the same hook, a perverted expression of Prisot's, or

on one another, or nobody. Thus Finch quotes Prisot; Wingate also;

Sheppard quotes Prisot, Finch and Wingate; Hale cites nobody; the court

in Woolston's case cite Hale; Wood cites Woolston's case; Blackstone

that and Hale; and Lord Mansfield, like Hale, ventures it on his own

authority. In the earlier ages of the law, as in the year-books, for

instance, we do not expect much recurrence to authorities by the judges,

because in those days there were few or none such made public. But in

latter times we take no judge's word for what the law is, further than

he is warranted by the authorities he appeals to. His decision may bind

the unfortunate individual who happens to be the particular subject of

it; but it cannot alter the law. Though the common law may be termed

"Lex non Scripta," yet the same Hale tells us "when I call those parts

of our laws Leges non Scriptæ, I do not mean as if those laws were

only oral, or communicated from the former ages to the latter merely

by word. For all those laws have their several monuments in writing,

whereby they are transferred from one age to another, and without which

they would soon lose all kind of certainty. They are for the most part

extant in records of pleas, proceedings, and judgments, in books of

reports and judicial decisions, in tractates of learned men's arguments

and opinions, preserved from ancient times and still extant in writing."

Hale's H. c. d. 22. Authorities for what is common law may therefore

be as well cited, as for any part of the Lex Scripta, and there is no

better instance of the necessity of holding the judges and writers to a

declaration of their authorities than the present; where we detect them

endeavoring to make law where they found none, and to submit us at one

stroke to a whole system, no particle of which has its foundation in the

common law. For we know that the common law is that system of law which

was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement in England, and altered

from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the

date of Magna Charta, which terminates the period of the common law, or

lex non scripta, and commences that of the statute law, or Lex Scripta.

This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But

Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion

of the first Christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about

the year 598, and that of the last about 686. Here, then, was a space

of two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and

Christianity no part of it. If it ever was adopted, therefore, into the

common law, it must have been between the introduction of Christianity

and the date of the Magna Charta. But of the laws of this period we have

a tolerable collection by Lambard and Wilkins, probably not perfect, but

neither very defective; and if any one chooses to build a doctrine on

any law of that period, supposed to have been lost, it is incumbent on

him to prove it to have existed, and what were its contents. These were

so far alterations of the common law, and became themselves a part of

it. But none of these adopt Christianity as a part of the common law.

If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of

Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of

the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their

laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to

find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though

contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity

neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. Another cogent proof

of this truth is drawn from the silence of certain writers on the common

law. Bracton gives us a very complete and scientific treatise of the

whole body of the common law. He wrote this about the close of the reign

of Henry III., a very few years after the date of the Magna Charta. We

consider this book as the more valuable, as it was written about the

time which divides the common and statute law, and therefore gives us

the former in its ultimate state. Bracton, too, was an ecclesiastic,

and would certainly not have failed to inform us of the adoption of

Christianity as a part of the common law, had any such adoption ever

taken place. But no word of his, which intimates anything like it, has

ever been cited. Fleta and Britton, who wrote in the succeeding reign

(of Edward I.), are equally silent. So also is Glanvil, an earlier writer

than any of them, (viz.: temp. H. 2,) but his subject perhaps might not

have led him to mention it. Justice Fortescue Aland, who possessed more

Saxon learning than all the judges and writers before mentioned put

together, places this subject on more limited ground. Speaking of the

laws of the Saxon kings, he says, "the ten commandments were made part

of their laws, and consequently were once part of the law of England; so

that to break any of the ten commandments was then esteemed a breach of

the common law, of England; and why it is not so now, perhaps it may be

difficult to give a good reason." Preface to Fortescue Aland's reports,

xvii. Had he proposed to state with more minuteness how much of the

scriptures had been made a part of the common law, he might have added

that in the laws of Alfred, where he found the ten commandments, two

or three other chapters of Exodus are copied almost verbatim. But the

adoption of a part proves rather a rejection of the rest, as municipal

law. We might as well say that the Newtonian system of philosophy is a

part of the common law, as that the Christian religion is. The truth is

that Christianity and Newtonianism being reason and verity itself, in

the opinion of all but infidels and Cartesians, they are protected under

the wings of the common law from the dominion of other sects, but not

erected into dominion over them. An eminent Spanish physician affirmed

that the lancet had slain more men than the sword. Doctor Sangrado, on

the contrary, affirmed that with plentiful bleedings, and draughts of

warm water, every disease was to be cured. The common law protects both

opinions, but enacts neither into law. See post. 879.

879. Howard, in his Contumes Anglo-Normandes, 1. 87, notices the

falsification of the laws of Alfred, by prefixing to them four chapters

of the Jewish law, to wit: the 20th, 21st, 22d and 23d chapters of

Exodus, to which he might have added the 15th chapter of the Acts of the

Apostles, v. 23, and precepts from other parts of the scripture. These

he calls a _hors d'œuvre_ of some pious copyist. This awkward monkish

fabrication makes the preface to Alfred's genuine laws stand in the body

of the work, and the very words of Alfred himself prove the fraud; for he

declares, in that preface, that he has collected these laws from those

of Ina, of Offa, Aethelbert and his ancestors, saying nothing of any of

them being taken from the Scriptures. It is still more certainly proved

by the inconsistencies it occasions. For example, the Jewish legislator

Exodus xxi. 12, 13, 14, (copied by the Pseudo Alfred § 13,) makes murder,

with the Jews, death. But Alfred himself, Le. xxvi., punishes it by

a fine only, called a Weregild, proportioned to the condition of the

person killed. It is remarkable that Hume (append. 1 to his History)

examining this article of the laws of Alfred, without perceiving the

fraud, puzzles himself with accounting for the inconsistency it had

introduced. To strike a pregnant woman so that she die is death by

Exodus, xxi. 22, 23, and Pseud. Alfr. § 18; but by the laws of Alfred

ix., pays a Weregild for both woman and child. To smite out an eye, or

a tooth, Exod. xxi. 24-27. Pseud. Alfr. § 19, 20, if of a servant by his

master, is freedom to the servant; in every other case retaliation. But

by Alfr. Le. xl. a fixed indemnification is paid. Theft of an ox, or a

sheep, by the Jewish law, Exod. xxii. 1, was repaid five-fold for the

ox and four-fold for the sheep; by the Pseudograph § 24, the ox double,

the sheep four-fold; but by Alfred Le. xvi., he who stole a cow and

a calf was to repay the worth of the cow and 401 for the calf. Goring

by an ox was the death of the ox, and the flesh not to be eaten. Exod.

xxi. 28. Pseud. Alfr. § 21 by Alfred Le. xxiv., the wounded person had

the ox. The Pseudograph makes municipal laws of the ten commandments,

§ 1--10, regulates concubinage, § 12, makes it death to strike or to

curse father or mother, § 14, 15, gives an eye for an eye, tooth for

a tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for

wound, strife for strife, § 19; sells the thief to repay his theft, §

24; obliges the fornicator to marry the woman he has lain with, § 29;

forbids interest on money, § 35; makes the laws of bailment, § 28, very

different from what Lord Holt delivers in Coggs v. Bernard, ante 92, and

what Sir William Jones tells us they were; and punishes witchcraft with

death, § 30, which Sir Matthew Hale, 1 H. P. C. B. 1, ch. 33, declares

was not a felony before the Stat. 1, Jac. 12. It was under that statute,

and not this forgery, that he hung Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, 16 Car.

2, (1662,) on whose trial he declared "that there were such creatures as

witches he made no doubt at all; for first the Scripture had affirmed so

much, secondly the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such

persons, and such hath been the judgment of this kingdom, as appears by

that act of Parliament which hath provided punishment proportionable to

the quality of the offence." And we must certainly allow greater weight

to this position that "it was no felony till James' Statute," laid

down deliberately in his H. P. C., a work which he wrote to be printed,

finished, and transcribed for the press in his life time, than to the

hasty scripture that "at _common law_ witchcraft was punished with death

as heresy, by writ de Heretico Comburendo" in his Methodical Summary

of the P. C. p. 6, a work "not intended for the press, not fitted for

it, and which he declared himself he had never read over since it was

written;" Pref. Unless we understand his meaning in that to be that

witchcraft could not be punished at common law as witchcraft, but as

heresy. In either sense, however, it is a denial of this pretended law

of Alfred. Now, all men of reading know that these pretended laws of

homicide, concubinage, theft, retaliation, compulsory marriage, usury,

bailment, and others which might have been cited, from the Pseudograph,

were never the laws of England, not even in Alfred's time; and of course

that it is a forgery. Yet palpable as it must be to every lawyer, the

English judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was

shrouded. In truth, the alliance between Church and State in England

has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy; and

even bolder than they are. For instead of being contented with these

four surreptitious chapters of Exodus, they have taken the whole leap,

and declared at once that the whole Bible and Testament in a lump, make

a part of the common law; ante 873: the first judicial declaration of

which was by this same Sir Matthew Hale. And thus they incorporate into

the English code laws made for the Jews alone, and the precepts of the

gospel, intended by their benevolent author as obligatory only in _foro

concientiæ_; and they arm the whole with the coercions of municipal law.

In doing this, too, they have not even used the Connecticut caution of

declaring, as is done in their blue laws, that the laws of God shall

be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them; but

they swallow the yea and nay together. Finally, in answer to Fortescue

Aland's question why the ten commandments should not now be a part of

the common law of England? we may say they are not because they never

were made so by legislative authority, the document which has imposed

that doubt on him being a manifest forgery.

TO DR. JOHN MANNERS.

MONTICELLO, February 22, 1814.

SIR,--The opinion which, in your letter of January 24, you are pleased

to ask of me, on the comparative merits of the different methods of

classification adopted by different writers on Natural History, is one

which I could not have given satisfactorily, even at the earlier period

at which the subject was more familiar; still less, after a life of

continued occupation in civil concerns has so much withdrawn me from

studies of that kind. I can, therefore, answer but in a very general

way. And the text of this answer will be found in an observation in your

letter, where, speaking of nosological systems, you say that disease

has been found to be an unit. Nature has, in truth, produced units only

through all her works. Classes, orders, genera, species, are not of

her work. Her creation is of individuals. No two animals are exactly

alike; no two plants, nor even two leaves or blades of grass; no two

crystallizations. And if we may venture from what is within the cognizance

of such organs as ours, to conclude on that beyond their powers, we

must believe that no two particles of matter are of exact resemblance.

This infinitude of units or individuals being far beyond the capacity

of our memory, we are obliged, in aid of that, to distribute them into

masses, throwing into each of these all the individuals which have a

certain degree of resemblance; to subdivide these again into smaller

groups, according to certain points of dissimilitude observable in

them, and so on until we have formed what we call a system of classes,

orders, genera and species. In doing this, we fix arbitrarily on such

characteristic resemblances and differences as seem to us most prominent

and invariable in the several subjects, and most likely to take a strong

hold in our memories. Thus Ray formed one classification on such lines of

division as struck him most favorably; Klein adopted another; Brisson a

third, and other naturalists other designations, till Linnæus appeared.

Fortunately for science, he conceived in the three kingdoms of nature,

modes of classification which obtained the approbation of the learned of

all nations. His system was accordingly adopted by all, and united all

in a general language. It offered the three great desiderata: First, of

aiding the memory to retain a knowledge of the productions of nature.

Secondly, of rallying all to the same names for the same objects, so

that they could communicate understandingly on them. And Thirdly, of

enabling them, when a subject was first presented, to trace it by its

character up to the conventional name by which it was agreed to be

called. This classification was indeed liable to the imperfection of

bringing into the same group individuals which, though resembling in the

characteristics adopted by the author for his classification, yet have

strong marks of dissimilitude in other respects. But to this objection

every mode of classification must be liable, because the plan of creation

is inscrutable to our limited faculties. Nature has not arranged her

productions on a single and direct line. They branch at every step, and

in every direction, and he who attempts to reduce them into departments,

is left to do it by the lines of his own fancy. The objection of bringing

together what are disparata in nature, lies against the classifications

of Blumenbach and of Cuvier, as well as that of Linnæus, and must

forever lie against all. Perhaps not in equal degree; on this I do not

pronounce. But neither is this so important a consideration as that of

uniting all nations under one language in Natural History. This had been

happily effected by Linnæus, and can scarcely be hoped for a second time.

Nothing indeed is so desperate as to make all mankind agree in giving up

a language they possess, for one which they have to learn. The attempt

leads directly to the confusion of the tongues of Babel. Disciples of

Linnæus, of Blumenbach, and of Cuvier, exclusively possessing their own

nomenclatures, can no longer communicate intelligibly with one another.

However much, therefore, we are indebted to both these naturalists, and

to Cuvier especially, for the valuable additions they have made to the

sciences of nature, I cannot say they have rendered her a service in

this attempt to innovate in the settled nomenclature of her productions;

on the contrary, I think it will be a check on the progress of science,

greater or less, in proportion as their schemes shall more or less

prevail. They would have rendered greater service by holding fast to

the system on which we had once all agreed, and by inserting into that

such new genera, orders, or even classes, as new discoveries should call

for. Their systems, too, and especially that of Blumenbach, are liable

to the objection of giving too much into the province of anatomy. It

may be said, indeed, that anatomy is a part of natural history. In the

broad sense of the word, it certainly is. In that sense, however, it

would comprehend all the natural sciences, every created thing being a

subject of natural history in extenso. But in the subdivisions of general

science, as has been observed in the particular one of natural history,

it has been necessary to draw arbitrary lines, in order to accommodate

our limited views. According to these, as soon as the structure of any

natural production is destroyed by art, it ceases to be a subject of

natural history, and enters into the domain ascribed to chemistry, to

pharmacy, to anatomy, &c. Linnæus' method was liable to this objection

so far as it required the aid of anatomical dissection, as of the heart,

for instance, to ascertain the place of any animal, or of a chemical

process for that of a mineral substance. It would certainly be better to

adopt as much as possible such exterior and visible characteristics as

every traveller is competent to observe, to ascertain and to relate. But

with this objection, lying but in a small degree, Linnæus' method was

received, understood, and conventionally settled among the learned, and

was even getting into common use. To disturb it then was unfortunate.

The new system attempted in botany, by Jussieu, in mineralogy, by Haüy,

are subjects of the same regret, and so also the no-system of Buffon,

the great advocate of individualism in opposition to classification. He

would carry us back to the days and to the confusion of Aristotle and

Pliny, give up the improvements of twenty centuries, and co-operate with

the neologists in rendering the science of one generation useless to

the next by perpetual changes of its language. In botany, Wildenow and

Persoon have incorporated into Linnæus the new discovered plants. I do not

know whether any one has rendered us the same service as to his natural

history. It would be a very acceptable one. The materials furnished by

Humboldt, and those from New Holland particularly, require to be digested

into the Catholic system. Among these, the Ornithorhyncus mentioned

by you, is an amusing example of the anomalies by which nature sports

with our schemes of classification. Although without mammæ, naturalists

are obliged to place it in the class of mammiferæ; and Blumenbach,

particularly, arranges it in his order of Palmipeds and toothless genus,

with the walrus and manatie. In Linnæus' system it might be inserted as

a new genus between the anteater and manis, in the order of Bruta. It

seems, in truth, to have stronger relations with that class than any

other in the construction of the heart, its red and warm blood, hairy

integuments, in being quadruped and viviparous, and may we not say, in its

_tout ensemble_, which Buffon makes his sole principle of arrangement?

The mandible, as you observe, would draw it towards the birds, were not

this characteristic overbalanced by the weightier ones before mentioned.

That of the Cloaca is equivocal, because although a character of birds,

yet some mammalia, as the beaver and sloth, have the rectum and urinary

passage terminating at a common opening. Its ribs also, by their number

and structure, are nearer those of the bird than of the mammalia. It is

possible that further opportunities of examination may discover the mammæ.

Those of the Opossum are asserted, by the Chevalier d'Aboville, from his

own observations on that animal, made while here with the French army,

to be not discoverable until pregnancy, and to disappear as soon as the

young are weaned. The Duckbill has many additional particularities which

liken it to other genera, and some entirely peculiar. Its description

and history needs yet further information.

In what I have said on the method of classing, I have not at all meant to

insinuate that that of Linnæus is intrinsically preferable to those of

Blumenbach and Cuvier. I adhere to the Linnean because it is sufficient

as a ground-work, admits of supplementary insertions as new productions

are discovered, and mainly because it has got into so general use that

it will not be easy to displace it, and still less to find another which

shall have the same singular fortune of obtaining the general consent.

During the attempt we shall become unintelligible to one another, and

science will be really retarded by efforts to advance it made by its

most favorite sons. I am not myself apt to be alarmed at innovations

recommended by reason. That dread belongs to those whose interests or

prejudices shrink from the advance of truth and science. My reluctance is

to give up an universal language of which we are in possession, without

an assurance of general consent to receive another. And the higher the

character of the authors recommending it, and the more excellent what

they offer, the greater the danger of producing schism.

I should seem to need apology for these long remarks to you who are

so much more recent in these studies, but I find it in your particular

request and my own respect for it, and with that be pleased to accept

the assurance of my esteem and consideration.

JOHN ADAMS TO THOMAS JEFFERSON.

QUINCY, February, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--I was nibbing my pen and brushing my faculties, to write a

polite letter of thanks to Mr. Counsellor Barton, for his valuable memoirs

of Dr. Rittenhouse, (though I could not account for his sending it to

me), when I received your favor of January 25th. I now most cordially

endorse my thanks over to you. The book is in the modern American style,

an able imitation of Marshall's Washington, though far more entertaining

and instructive; a Washington Mausoleum; an Egyptian pyramid. I shall

never read it any more than Taylor's aristocracy. Mrs. Adams reads it

with great delight, and reads to me what she finds interesting, and that

is indeed the whole book. I have not time to hear it all.

Rittenhouse was a virtuous and amiable man, an exquisite mechanician,

master of the astronomy known in his time; an expert mathematician, a

patient calculator of numbers. But we have had a Winthrop, an Andrew

Oliver, a Willard, a Webber, his equals, and we have a Bowditch his

superior in all these particulars, except the mechanism. But you know

Philadelphia is the heart, the censorium, the pineal gland of the United

States.

In politics, Rittenhouse was a good, simple, ignorant, well-meaning,

Franklinian democrat, totally ignorant of the world. As an anchorite,

an honest dupe of the French Revolution; a mere instrument of Jonathan

Dickinson Sargent, Dr. Hutchinson, Genet, and Mifflin, I give him all

the credit of his Planetarium. The improvement of the Orrery to the

Planetarium was an easy, natural thought, and nothing was wanting but

calculations of orbits Distranus, and periods of revolutions; all of which

were made to his hands long before he existed. Patience, perseverance,

and sleight of hand, is his undoubted merit and praise. I had read Taylor

in the Senate, till his style was so familiar to me that I had not read

three pages, before I suspected the author. I wrote a letter to him,

and he candidly acknowledged that the six hundred and fifty pages were

sent me with his consent. I wait with impatience for the publication,

and annunciation of the work. Arator ought not to have been adulterated

with politics, but his precept "Gather up the fragments that nothing be

lost," is of inestimable value in agriculture and horticulture. Every

weed, cob, husk, stalk, ought to be saved for manure.

Your researches in the laws of England establishing Christianity as

the law of the land, and part of the common law, are curious and very

important. Questions without number will arise in this country. Religious

controversies, and ecclesiastical contests, are as common, and will be

as sharp as any in civil politics, foreign and domestic. In what sense,

and to what extent the Bible is law, may give rise to as many doubts and

quarrels as any of our civil, political, military, or maritime laws,

and will intermix with them all, to irritate factions of every sort.

I dare not look beyond my nose into futurity. Our money, our commerce,

our religion, our National and State Constitutions, even our arts and

sciences, are so many seed plots, of division, faction, sedition and

rebellion. Everything is transmuted into an instrument of electioneering.

Election is the grand Brahma, the immortal Lama, I had almost said, the

Juggernaut; for wives are almost ready to burn upon the pile, and children

to be thrown under the wheel. You will perceive, by these figures, that

I have been looking into oriental history, and Hindoo religion. I have

read voyages, and travels, and everything I could collect, and the last

is Priestley's "Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with those of

the Hindoos, and other Ancient Nations," a work of great labor, and

not less haste. I thank him for the labor, and forgive, though I lament

the hurry. You would be fatigued to read, and I, just recruiting from a

little longer confinement and indisposition than I have had for thirty

years, have not strength to write many observations. But I have been

disappointed in the principal points of my curiosity:

1st. I am disappointed by finding that no just comparison can be made,

because the original Shasta, and the original Vedams are not obtained,

or if obtained, not yet translated into any European language.

2d. In not finding such morsels of the sacred books as have been

translated and published, which are more honorable to the original Hindoo

religion than anything he has quoted.

3d. In not finding a full development of the history of the doctrine of

the Metempsichosis which originated--

4th. In the history of the rebellion of innumerable hosts of angels in

Heaven against the Supreme Being, who after some thousands of years

of war, conquered them, and hurled them down to the regions of total

darkness, where they have suffered a part of the punishment of their

crime, and then were mercifully released from prison, permitted to

ascend to earth, and migrate into all sorts of animals, reptiles, birds,

beasts, and men, according to their rank and character, and even into

vegetables, and minerals, there to serve on probation. If they passed

without reproach their several gradations, they were permitted to become

cows and men. If as men they behaved well, _i. e._ to the satisfaction

of the priests, they were restored to their original rank and bliss in

Heaven.

5th. In not finding the Trinity of Pythagoras and Plato, their contempt

of matter, flesh, and blood, their almost adoration of fire and water,

their metempsichosis, and even the prohibition of beans, so evidently

derived from India.

6th. In not finding the prophecy of Enoch deduced from India, in which

the fallen angels make such a figure. But you are weary. Priestley has

proved the superiority of the Hebrews to the Hindoos, as they appear in

the Gentoo laws, and institutes of Menu; but the comparison remains to

be made with the Shasta.

In his remarks on Mr. Dupuis, page 342, Priestley says: "The History

of the fallen angels is another circumstance, on which Mr. Dupuis lays

much stress. According to the Christians, he says, Vol. I, page 336,

there was from the beginning a division among the angels; some remaining

faithful to the light, and others taking the part of darkness, &c.; but

this supposed history is not found in the Scriptures. It has only been

inferred, from a wrong interpretation of one passage in the 2d epistle

of Peter, and a corresponding one in that of Jude, as has been shown by

judicious writers. That there is such a person as the Devil, is not a

part of my faith, nor that of many other Christians, nor am I sure that

it was the belief of any of the Christian writers. Neither do I believe

the doctrine of demoniacal possessions, whether it was believed by the

sacred writers or not; and yet my unbelief in these articles does not

affect my faith in the great facts of which the Evangelists were eye

and ear witnesses. They might not be competent judges in the one case,

though perfectly so with respect to the other."

I will ask Priestley, when I see him, do you believe those passages in

Peter and Jude to be interpolations? If so, by whom made? And when? And

where? And for what end? Was it to support, or found, the doctrine of

the fall of man, original sin, the universal corruption, depravation and

guilt of human nature and mankind; and the subsequent incarnation of God

to make atonement and redemption? Or do you think that Peter and Jude

believed the book of Enoch to have been written by the seventh from Adam,

and one of the sacred canonical books of the Hebrew Prophets? Peter,

2d epistle, c. 2d, v. 4th, says "For if God spared not the angels that

sinned, but cast them down to _hell_, and delivered them into chains of

_darkness_ to be reserved unto Judgment." Jude, v. 6th says, "and the

angels which kept their first estate, but left their own habitations,

he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness, unto the judgment

of the great day." Verse 14th, "And Enoch, also, the seventh from Adam,

prophesied of these sayings, behold the Lord cometh with ten thousands of

his saints, to execute judgment upon all," &c. Priestley says, "a wrong

interpretation" has been given to these texts. I wish he had favored

us with his right interpretation of them. In another place, page 326,

Priestley says, "There is no circumstance of which Mr. Dupuis avails

himself so much, or repeats so often, both with respect to the Jewish and

Christian religions, as the history of the _Fall of Man_, in the book of

Genesis." I believe with him, and have maintained in my writings, that

this history is either an allegory, or founded on uncertain tradition,

that it is an hypothesis to account for the origin of evil, adopted by

Moses, which by no means accounts for the facts.

_March 3d._ So far was written almost a month ago; but sickness has

prevented progress. I had much more to say about this work. I shall never

be a disciple of Priestley. He is as absurd, inconsistent, credulous

and incomprehensible, as Athanasius. Read his letter to the Jews in this

volume. Could a rational creature write it? Aye! such rational creatures

as Rochefoucauld, and Condorcet, and John Taylor, in politics, and

Towers' Jurieus, and French Prophets in Theology. Priestley's account

of the philosophy and religion of India, appears to me to be such a

work as a man of busy research would produce--who should undertake to

describe Christianity from the sixth to the twelfth century, when a

deluge of wonders overflowed the world; when miracles were performed

and proclaimed from every convent, and monastery, hospital, churchyard,

mountain, valley, cave and cupola.

There is a book which I wish I possessed. It has never crossed the

Atlantic. It is entitled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes in folio.

It contains the lives of the Saints. It was compiled in the beginning

of the sixteenth century by Bollandus, Henschenius and Papebrock. What

would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught,

all the legends, true, doubtful and false.

These Bollandists dared to discuss some of the facts, and hint that

some of them were doubtful. E. G. Papebrock doubted the antiquity of the

Carmellites from Elias; and whether the face of Jesus Christ was painted

on the handkerchief of St. Véronique; and whether the prepuce of the

Saviour of the world, which was shown in the church of Antwerp, could

be proved to be genuine? For these bold scepticisms he was libelled in

pamphlets, and denounced by the Pope, and the Inquisition in Spain. The

Inquisition condemned him; but the Pope not daring to acquit or condemn

him, prohibited all writings pro. and con. But as the physicians cure one

disease by exciting another, as a fever by a salivation, this Bull was

produced by a new claim. The brothers of the Order of Charity asserted

a descent from Abraham, nine hundred years anterior to the Carmellites.

A philosopher who should write a description of Christianism from the

Bollandistic Saints of the sixth and tenth century would probably produce

a work tolerably parallel to Priestley's upon the Hindoos.

TO GIDEON GRANGER, ESQ.

MONTICELLO, March 9, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--Your letter of February 22d came to hand on the 4th instant.

Nothing is so painful to me as appeals to my memory on the subject of

past transactions. From 1775 to 1809, my life was an unremitting course

of public transactions, so numerous, so multifarious, and so diversified

by places and persons, that, like the figures of a magic lanthern,

their succession was with a rapidity that scarcely gave time for fixed

impressions. Add to this the decay of memory consequent on advancing

years, and it will not be deemed wonderful that I should be a stranger as

it were even to my own transactions. Of some indeed I retain recollections

of the particular, as well as general circumstances; of others a strong

impression of the general fact, with an oblivion of particulars; but

of a great mass, not a trace either of general or particular remains in

my mind. I have duly pondered the facts stated in your letter, and for

the refreshment of my memory have gone over the letters which passed

between us while I was in the administration of the government, have

examined my private notes, and such other papers as could assist me in

the recovery of the facts, and shall now state them seriatim from your

letter, and give the best account of them I am able to derive from the

joint sources of memory and papers.

"I have been denounced as a Burrite; but you know that in 1800 I sent

Erving from Boston to inform Virginia of the danger resulting from his

intrigues." I well remember Mr. Erving's visit to this State about that

time, and his suggestions of the designs meditated in the quarter you

mention; but as my duties on the occasion were to be merely passive, he

of course, as I presume, addressed his communications more particularly

to those who were free to use them. I do not recollect his mentioning

you; but I find that in your letter to me of April 26, 1804, you state

your agency on that occasion, so that I have no reason to doubt the fact.

"That in 1803-4, on my advice, you procured Erastus Granger to inform

De Witt Clinton of the plan to elevate Burr in New York." Here I do

not recollect the particulars; but I have a general recollection that

Colonel Burr's conduct had already, at that date rendered his designs

suspicious; that being for that reason laid aside by his constituents

as Vice President, and aiming to become the Governor of New York, it was

thought advisable that the persons of influence in that State should be

put on their guard; and Mr. Clinton being eminent, no one was more likely

to receive intimations from us, nor any one more likely to be confided

in for their communication than yourself. I have no doubt therefore of

the fact, and the less because in your letter to me of October 9, 1806,

you remind me of it.

About the same period, that is, in the winter of 1803-4, another train

of facts took place which, although not specifically stated in your

letter, I think it but justice to yourself that I should state. I mean

the intrigues which were in agitation, and at the bottom of which we

believed Colonel Burr to be; to form a coalition of the five eastern

States, with New York and New Jersey, under the new appellation of the

seven eastern States; either to overawe the Union by the combination of

their power and their will, or by threats of separating themselves from

it. Your intimacy with some of those in the secret gave you opportunities

of searching into their proceedings, of which you made me daily and

confidential reports. This intimacy to which I had such useful recourse,

at the time, rendered you an object of suspicion with many as being

yourself a partisan of Colonel Burr, and engaged in the very combination

which you were faithfully employed in defeating. I never failed to

justify you to all those who brought their suspicions to me, and to assure

them of my knowledge of your fidelity. Many were the individuals, then

members of the legislature, who received these assurances from me, and

whose apprehensions were thereby quieted. This first project of Colonel

Burr having vanished in smoke, he directed to the western country those

views which are the subject of your next article.

"That in 1806, I communicated by the first mail after I had got knowledge

of the fact, the supposed plans of Burr in his western expedition;

upon which communication your council was first called together to

take measures in relation to that subject." Not exactly on that single

communication; on the 15th and 18th of September, I had received letters

from Colonel George Morgan, and from a Mr. Nicholson of New York,

suggesting in a general way the manœuvres of Colonel Burr. Similar

information came to the Secretary of State from a Mr. Williams of

New York. The indications, however, were so vague that I only desired

their increased attention to the subject, and further communications

of what they should discover. Your letter of October 16, conveying

the communications of General Eaton to yourself and to Mr. Ely gave a

specific view of the objects of this new conspiracy, and corroborating

our previous information, I called the Cabinet together, on the 22d of

October, when specific measures were adopted for meeting the dangers

threatened in the various points in which they might occur. I say your

letter of October 16 gave this information, because its date, with the

circumstance of its being no longer on my files, induce me to infer it

was that particular letter, which having been transferred to the bundle

of the documents of that conspiracy, delivered to the Attorney General,

is no longer in my possession.

Your mission of Mr. Pease on the route to New Orleans, at the time of

that conspiracy, with powers to see that the mails were expected, and

to dismiss at once every agent of the Post Office whose fidelity could

be justly doubted, and to substitute others on the spot was a necessary

measure, taken with my approbation; and he executed the trusts to my

satisfaction. I do not know however that my subsequent appointment of

him to the office of Surveyor General was influenced, as you suppose, by

those services. My motives in that appointment were my personal knowledge

of his mathematical qualifications and satisfactory informations of the

other parts of his character.

With respect to the dismission of the prosecutions for sedition in

Connecticut, it is well known to have been a tenet of the republican

portion of our fellow citizens, that the sedition law was contrary to

the constitution and therefore void. On this ground I considered it

as a nullity wherever I met it in the course of my duties; and on this

ground I directed _nolle prosequis_ in all the prosecutions which had

been instituted under it, and as far as the public sentiment can be

inferred from the occurrences of the day, we may say that this opinion

had the sanction of the nation. The prosecutions, therefore, which were

afterwards instituted in Connecticut, of which two were against printers,

two against preachers, and one against a judge, were too inconsistent

with this principle to be permitted to go on. We were bound to administer

to others the same measure of law, not which they had meted to us, but

we to ourselves, and to extend to all equally the protection of the same

constitutional principles. These prosecutions, too, were chiefly for

charges against myself, and I had from the beginning laid it down as a

rule to notice nothing of the kind. I believed that the long course of

services in which I had acted on the public stage, and under the eye of

my fellow citizens, furnished better evidence to them of my character

and principles, than the angry invectives of adverse partisans in whose

eyes the very acts most approved by the majority were subjects of the

greatest demerit and censure. These prosecutions against them, therefore,

were to be dismissed as a matter of duty. But I wished it to be done with

all possible respect to the worthy citizens who had advised them, and

in such way as to spare their feelings which had been justly irritated

by the intemperance of their adversaries. As you were of that State and

intimate with these characters, the business was confided to you, and

you executed it to my perfect satisfaction.

These I think are all the particular facts on which you have asked

my testimony, and I add with pleasure, and under a sense of duty, the

declaration that the increase of rapidity in the movement of the mails

which had been vainly attempted before, were readily undertaken by you

on your entrance into office, and zealously and effectually carried into

execution, and that the affairs of the office were conducted by you with

ability and diligence, so long as I had opportunities of observing them.

With respect to the first article mentioned in your letter, in which I

am neither concerned nor consulted, I will yet, as a friend, volunteer

my advice. I never knew anything of it, nor would ever listen to such

gossiping trash. Be assured, my dear Sir, that the dragging such a

subject before the public will excite universal reprobation, and they

will drown in their indignation all the solid justifications which

they would otherwise have received and weighed with candor. Consult

your own experience, reflect on the similar cases which have happened

within your own knowledge, and see if ever there was a single one in

which such a mode of recrimination procured favor to him who used it.

You may give pain where perhaps you wish it, but be assured it will

re-act on yourself with double though delayed effect, and that it will

be one of those incidents of your life on which you will never reflect

with satisfaction. Be advised, then; erase it even from your memory,

and stand erect before the world on the high ground of your own merits,

without stooping to what is unworthy either of your or their notice.

Remember that we often repent of what we have said, but never, never

of that which we have not. You may have time enough hereafter to mend

your hold, if ever it can be mended by such matter as that. Take time

then, and do not commit your happiness and public estimation by too much

precipitancy. I am entirely uninformed of the state of things which you

say exists, and which will oblige you to make a solemn appeal to the

nation, in vindication of your character. But whatever that be, I feel

it a duty to bear testimony to the truth, and I have suggested with

frankness other considerations occurring to myself, because I wish you

well, and I add sincere assurances of my great respect and esteem.

TO HORATIO G. SPAFFORD.

MONTICELLO, March 17, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--I am an unpunctual correspondent at best. While my affairs

permit me to be within doors, I am too apt to take up a book and to forget

the calls of the writing-table. Besides this, I pass a considerable

portion of my time at a possession so distant, and uncertain as to its

mails, that my letters always await my return here. This must apologise

for my being so late in acknowledging your two favors of December 17th

and January 28th, as also that of the Gazetteer, which came safely to

hand. I have read it with pleasure, and derived from it much information

which I did not possess before. I wish we had as full a statement as to

all our States. We should know ourselves better, our circumstances and

resources, and the advantageous ground we stand on as a whole. We are

certainly much indebted to you for this fund of valuable information.

I join in your reprobation of our merchants, priests, and lawyers, for

their adherence to England and monarchy, in preference to their own

country and its constitution. But merchants have no country. The mere

spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that

from which they draw their gains. In every country and in every age, the

priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the

despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is

easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving

them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever

preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind,

and therefore the safer engine for their purposes. With the lawyers it

is a new thing. They have, in the mother country, been generally the

firmest supporters of the free principles of their constitution. But

there too they have changed. I ascribe much of this to the substitution of

Blackstone for my Lord Coke, as an elementary work. In truth, Blackstone

and Hume have made tories of all England, and are making tories of those

young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them

above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. These two books,

but especially the former, have done more towards the suppression of the

liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte and

the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand

loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker. I fear nothing for our

liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and

fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and

the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts. When

I look around me for security against these seductions, I find it in

the wide-spread of our agricultural citizens, in their unsophisticated

minds, their independence and their power, if called on, to crush the

Humists of our cities, and to maintain the principles which severed us

from England. I see our safety in the extent of our confederacy, and

in the probability that in the proportion of that the sound parts will

always be sufficient to crush local poisons. In this hope I rest, and

tender you the assurance of my esteem and respect.

TO MR. GIRARDIN.

MONTICELLO, March 18, 1814.

DEAR SIR,--According to your request of the other day, I send you my

formula and explanation of Lord Napier's theorem, for the solution of

right-angled spherical triangles. With you I think it strange that the

French mathematicians have not used or noticed this method more than

they have done. Montucla, in his account of Lord Napier's inventions,

expresses a like surprise at this fact, and does justice to the ingenuity,

the elegance, and convenience of the theorem, which, by a single rule

easily preserved in the memory, supplies the whole table of cases given

in the books of spherical trigonometry. Yet he does not state the rule,

but refers for it to Wolf, Cours de Mathematiques. I have not the larger

work of Wolf; and in the French translation of his abridgement, (by

some member of the congregation of St. Maur,) the branch of spherical

trigonometry is entirely omitted. Potter, one of the English authors

of Courses of Mathematics, has given the Catholic proposition, as it

is called, but in terms unintelligible, and leading to error, until, by

repeated trials, we have ascertained the meaning of some of his equivocal

expressions. In Robert Simson's Euclid we have the theorem with its

demonstrations, but less aptly for the memory, divided into two rules, and

these are extended as the original was, only to the cases of right-angled

triangles. Hutton, in his Course of Mathematics, declines giving the

rules, as "too artificial to be applied by young computists." But I do

not think this. It is true that when we use them, their demonstration is

not always present to the mind; but neither is this the case generally in

using mathematical theorems, or in the various steps of an algebraical

process. We act on them, however, mechanically, and with confidence,

as truths of which we have heretofore been satisfied by demonstration,

although we do not at the moment retrace the processes which establish

them. Hutton, however, in his Mathematical Dictionary, under the terms

"circular parts," and "extremes," has given us the rules, and in all

their extensions to oblique spherical, and to plane triangles. I have

endeavored to reduce them to a form best adapted to my own frail memory,

by couching them in the fewest words possible, and such as cannot, I

think, mislead, or be misunderstood. My formula, with the explanation

which may be necessary for your pupils, is as follows: