only who distinguish themselves the expected rewards. I hope you are duly sensible of the value of the studies through which you have just passed, and of the expediency of keeping them alive by a collateral and incidental cultivation of them. Philosophy and literature are always a recreation and improvement grateful to an unvitiated mind; and it may be repeated, with the oracular sanction of Cicero, that there is no branch of knowledge which may not be involved in legal questions, or made to illustrate or embellish forensic discussions.

Allow me to close this brief answer to your letter, dictated in the crippled state of my health, with the affectionate wish that your career in life, whatever it may be, will in every respect be such as to render it the harbinger of a better.

TO PRESIDENT JACKSON.

MONTPELLIER, October 11th, 1835.

DEAR SIR, I have duly received your favor of the 7th, with the letter and medal from Mr. Goddard which you were good enough to forward under your cover.

The use made of our expressed opinion on the temperance subject denotes the peculiar zeal with which its patrons are inspired. Should ardent spirits be every where banished from the list of drinks, it will be a revolution not the least remarkable in this revolutionary age, and our country will have its full share in that as in other merits.

I thank you, sir, for the kind interest you express in my health. It has been for a considerable time much broken by chronic complaints, which, added to my great age, have reduced me to a state of much debility, particularly in my limbs.

I observed with pleasure that you had returned from your periodical trip to the Rip-Raps with the salubrious advantage promised by it.

Mrs. Madison joins me in a return of your good wishes, and we pray you to be assured of the sincerity and high respect with which it is offered.

TO CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.

MONTPELLIER, October 13, 1835. DEAR SIR, I have received your letter of September 30, with a copy of "An Appeal" from the new to the old Whigs. The pamphlet contains very able and interesting views of its subject.

The claims for the Senate of a share in the removal from office, and for the legislature an authority to regulate its tenure, have had powerful advocates. I must still think, however, that the text of the Constitution is best interpreted by reference to the tripartite theory of government to which practice has conformed, and which so long and uniform a practice would seem to have established.

The face of the Constitution and the journalized proceedings of the Convention strongly indicate a partiality to that theory, then at its zenith of favor among the most distinguished commentators on the organizations of political power.

The right of suffrage, the rule of apportioning representation, and the mode of appointing to and removing from office, are fundamentals in a free government, and ought to be fixed by the Constitution. If alterable by the legislature, the Government might become the creator of the Constitution of which it is itself but the creature; and if the large States could be reconciled to an augmentation of power in the Senate, constructed and endowed as that branch of the Government is, a veto on removals from office would at all times be worse than inconvenient in its operation, and in party times might, by throwing the executive machinery out of gear, produce a calamitous interregnum.

In making these remarks I am not unaware that in a country wide and expanding as ours is, and in the anxiety to convey information to the door of every citizen, an unforeseen multiplication of offices may add a weight to the executive scale, disturbing the equilibrium of the Government. I should therefore see with pleasure a guard against the evil, by whatever regulations having that effect may be within the scope of legislative power; or, if necessary, even by an amendment of the Constitu

tion when a lucid interval of party excitement shall invite the experiment.

With my thanks for your friendly communication and for the interest you express in my health, which is much broken by chronic complaints added to my great age, I pray you to accept the assurance of my respect and good wishes.

TO CHARLES J. INGERSOLL.

MONTPELLIER, Nov 8.

DR SIR, I thank you as a friend for the printed copy of your discourse kindly sent me, and I thank you still more as a citizen for such an offering to the free institutions of our country. In testing the tree of liberty by its fruits you have shewn how precious it ought to be held by those who enjoy the blessing. I wish the discourse could be translated and circulated wherever the blessing is not enjoyed. Were the truths it contains in possession of every adult in Europe, the portentous league against the rights and happiness of the human race would be formidable only to its authors and abettors.

TO ROBERT H. GOLDSBOROUGH.

MONTPELLIER, Decr 21, 1835.

DR SIR, I have received your letter of the 15th, with the tobacco seed it refers to. I tender the thanks due respectively to Mr. Vaughan and yourself for the obliging attention to which I am indebted, and will take measures for turning the seed to the best account.

I was favored many years ago by Col. G.. Mason with a sample of the like seed, and had hills enough planted from it to test its character in our climate. It was found to retain, though not entirely, its characteristic fragrance; but it was so inferior

in size and weight, that, with the idea of its anticipated degeneracy, and my general absence from home, the experiment was not continued. It certainly merits the fuller one which is now promised by the several hands into which the seed will be committed; especially as seed from the Island can be occasionally obtained in the event of a progressive degeneracy. It is not unworthy of consideration that the extending culture of the ordinary tobacco in the West will rapidly glut the market for that of Virginia and Maryland, and that the Cuba tobacco may succeed better in these States than in the Western soils. I have been informed by a gentleman who has resided in Cuba, and took notice of the tobacco crop, that it there requires a particular soil; and, as is said of your finest Maryland tobacco, that it is not every plant or even every leaf of the same plant that will possess the distinguished quality.

I pray you, sir, to accept for yourself, and to convey to Mr. Vaughan, with my best respects, a cordial return of the friendly sentiments and good wishes which your letter expresses on the part of both.

TO CHARLES J. INGERSOLL.

MONTPELLIER, Decr 30th, 1835.

DEAR SIR, I thank you, though at a late day, for the pamphlet comprising your address at New York.

The address is distinguished by some very important views of an important subject.

The absolutists on the "Let alone theory" overlook the two essential pre-requisites to a perfect freedom of external commerce-1. That it be universal among nations. 2. That peace be perpetual among them.

A perfect freedom of international commerce, manifestly requires that it be universal. If not so, a nation departing from the theory might regulate the commerce of a nation adhering to it, in subserviency to its own interest, and disadvantageously to the latter. In the case of navigation, so necessary under

different aspects, nothing is more clear than that a discrimination by one nation in favor of its own vessels, without an equiv alent discrimination on the side of another, must at once banish from the intercourse the navigation of the latter. This was verified by our own ante-Constitution experience, as the remedy for it has been by the post-Constitution experience.

But to a perfect freedom of commerce, universality is not the only condition; perpetual peace is another. War, so often occurring, and so liable to occur, is a disturbing incident entering into the calculations by which a nation ought to regulate its foreign commerce. It may well happen to a nation adhering strictly to the rule of buying cheap, that the rise of prices in nations at war may exceed the cost of a protective policy in time of peace; so that, taking the two periods together, protection would be cheapness. On this point, also, an appeal may be made to our own experience. The champions for the "Let alone policy" forget that theories are the offspring of the closet; exceptions and qualifications the lessons of experience.

TO THOMAS GILMER AND OTHERS OF THE COMMITTEE.

I have received, fellow-citizens, your letter inviting me, in behalf of a number of citizens of Albemarle, to partake of a public dinner on the approaching 4th of July.

For this mark of their kind attention, I can only offer an expression of my grateful sensibility; the debility of age, with a continuance of much indisposition, rendering it impossible for me to join them on the occasion.

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However conscious of the extent in which the partiality of my friends has overvalued my public career, I may be allowed say that they have done but justice in supposing that, though abstracted from a participation in public affairs, I have not ceased to feel a deep interest in the purity and permanence of our free and Republican institutions, characterized, as they are, first, by a division of the powers of Government between the States in their united and in their individual capacities; 2, by