the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly; and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasures of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives, which you have been vaunting in such elevated terms.

proper

gave us

Believe me, then, my friend, that that is a miserable arithmetic which would estimate friendship at nothing, or at less than nothing. Respect for you has induced me to enter into this discussion, and to hear principles uttered which I detest and abjure. Respect for myself now obliges me to recall into the you limits of your office. When nature assigned us the same habitation, she over it a divided empire. To you, she allotted the field of science; to me, that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance, is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympa thy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adopted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all; this to a few only, as sufficing with a few.

I know, indeed, that you pretend authority to the sovereign control of our conduct, in all its parts; and a respect for your grave saws and maxims, a desire to do what is right, have sometimes induced me to conform to your counsels. A few facts, however, which I can readily recall to your memory, will suffice to prove to you, that nature has not organized you for our moral direction. When the poor, wearied soldier whom we overtook at Chickahominy, with his pack on his back, begged us to let him get up behind our chariot, you began to calculate that the road was full of soldiers, and that if all should be taken up, our horses would fail in their journey. We drove on therefore. But, soon becoming sensible you had made me do wrong, that, though we can not relieve all the distressed, we should relieve as many as we can, I turned about to take up the soldier; but he had entered a

by-path, and was no more to be found; and from that moment to this I could never find him out to ask his forgiveness. Again, when the poor woman came to ask a charity in Philadelphia, you whispered that she looked like a drunkard, and that half a dollar was enough to give her for the ale-house. Those who want the dispositions to give, easily find reasons why they ought not to give. When I sought her out afterwards, and did what I should have done at first, you know that she employed the money immediately towards placing her child at school.

If our country, when pressed with wrongs, at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's. You began to calculate, and to compare wealth and numbers; we threw up a few pulsations of our blood; we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and blood; we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved our country; justifying, at the same time, the ways of Providence, whose precept is, to do always what is right, and leave the issue to Him.

In short, my friend, as far as my recollection serves me, I do not know that I ever did a good thing on your suggestion, or a dirty one without it. I do forever, then, disclaim your interference in my province. Fill paper as you please with triangles and squares; try how many ways you can hang and combine them together. I shall never envy nor control your sublime delights. But leave me to decide, when and where friendships are to be contracted. You say I contract them at random. So you said the woman at Philadelphia was a drunkard. I receive none into my esteem until I know they are worthy of it. Wealth, title, office, are no recommendations to my friendship. On the contrary, great good qualities are requisite to make amends for their having wealth, title, and office. You confess, that, in the present case, I could not have made a worthier choice. You only object that I was so soon to lose them. We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without its alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce. It is the condition annexed to all our pleasures, not by us who receive, but by him who gives them. True, this condition is pressing cruelly on me at this moment. I feel more fit for death than life. But when I look back upon the pleasures of which it is a consequence,

I am conscious they were worth the price I am paying. Notwithstanding your endeavors, too, to damp my hopes, I comfort myself with expectations of their promised return.

I thought this a favorable proposition whereon to rest the issue of the dialogue. So I put an end to it, by calling for my nightcap. Methinks, I hear you wish I had called a little sooner, and so spared you the ennui of such a sermon. I did not interrupt them sooner, because I was in a mood for hearing sermons. You, too, were the subject; and on such a thesis, I never think the theme long; not even if I am to write it, and that slowly and awkwardly, as now, with the left hand. But that you may not be discouraged from a correspondence which begins so formidably, I will promise you, on my honor, that my future letters shall be of a reasonable length. I will even agree to express but half of my esteem for you, for fear of cloying you with too full a dose. But, on your part, no curtailing. If your letters are as long as the Bible, they will appear short to me. Only let them be brimful of affection."

This last appeal to this married woman is characteristic of the school in which he was not free from impression, it would seem, and the whole letter, though entertaining, as coming from him, is, by no means, in moral or scientific force, worthy of Mr. Jefferson's heart and head. The correspondence was not maintained, probably from the disposition of the artist and her husband to think the amount of affection required on her part was hardly suited to the circumstances of the case.

CHAPTER XII.

ORGANIZING THE REPUBLIC-MR. JEFFERSON IN THE CABINET OF THE FIRST PRESIDENT-HE SNIFFS THE

MR.

AIR OF MONARCHY AT HOME AND

BEGINS TO RESIST.

R. JEFFERSON'S long residence in France had, to some extent, rendered him unfit to appreciate accurately the exact state of affairs in this country on his arrival. In France, from the time he first entered upon his duties there, he had seen a growing feeling in favor of republican government, and the last two years he remained abroad, he heard little else, and saw, step by step, the downfall of monarchy, and in the riotous proceedings of the volatile French, he saw nothing to make him distrust the pure republic which he advocated, but was more warmly drawn towards his own country, and anxious for the perpetuity of its own government. He had, indeed, been greatly mortified by the powerlessness of the Congress to carry out the simplest schemes, or to assume an honorable monetary character abroad, but little was he disturbed by the temporary and spasmodic resistance to taxation and other reluctantly called-for necessities of the government. He thought such things should be expected for a time. But few shared this kind of feeling at home. The most earnest friends of the Confederation, and the individuality of the States, saw the utter helplessness

.

of the Congress, the bad faith or the indifference and inactivity of the States; saw that little by little all responsibility seemed to be fading from public affairs, The experiment appeared

and feared for the result.

to be failing, and the anarchical and desperate state of affairs in France did not weaken the fears of earnest men at home. These things in all their worst forms stared the people in the face, and the length of the experiment of republican government had not been so great as to destroy entirely in many the memory of the more stable past. Absolute necessity had induced the most able men of the country to look for some escape, or some source of salvation, still anxious that a reliable solution of the difficulties might be found in the continued liberties of the people. The result was the formation of the Constitution and the establishment of the Federal Government. When Mr. Jefferson arrived in Virginia the contest for the Constitution was over, but the animosities and feeling manifested were yet fresh on the tongues of the people. "While all the Whigs had been patriots, they had never all been republicans," and many of those who were now willing to try the Constitution were doubtful of its success, and it is hardly reasonable to suppose that all the monarchic spirit of the prerevolutionary times was dead.

The new government was inaugurated at New York, the great seat of ancient toryism and monarchic sentiment, which was, no doubt, a disadvantage at the outset, and presented Mr. Jefferson a constant theme for reflection. This state of affairs would have been less apparent in Boston or Richmond.

Mr. Jefferson expressed his desires as to the