Congress, he reported in favour of a force sufficient for the protection of our Mediterranean commerce. He thinks that General Washington approved of building ships to that extent; and General Knox certainly, but Colonel Hamilton he does not remember. He admits that Mr. Adams's recollections are corroborated by "his known anxieties for a close connexion with Great Britain," and his consequent apprehension of collisions between their vessels and ours. That after some of the ships added in Mr. Adams's administration were sold, under a law passed while he was in office, he considered that the public safety might require some additional ships to be in readiness for the first moment of war, provided they could be preserved from decay, and without expense. With this view he proposed that they should be built in dry docks, above the level of the tide waters, and covered with roofs. But a majority of the legislature was against any addition to the navy, "and the minority, [meaning the federalists,] though for it in judgment, voted against it on a principle of opposition." He adverts to the present plan of building ships under shelter, until wanted, when they will be launched and finished, and remarks: "On my plan they could be in service at an hour's notice." He thus far expresses his existing opinions on the subject: "The navy of the late war certainly raised our rank and character among nations. Yet a navy is a very expensive engine. It is admitted that in ten or twelve years a vessel goes to entire decay; or if kept in repair, costs as much as would build a new one: and that a nation who could count on twelve or fifteen years of peace, would gain by burning its navy and building a new one in time. Its extent, therefore, he says, must be governed by circumstances; and that since his proposition "for a force adequate to the piracies of the Mediterranean, a similar necessity has arisen in our own for a considerable addition to that force; and he expresses the wish that a convention with the naval powers of Europe would agree to keep down the pirates of the Mediterranean and the slave ships on the coast of Africa, while our ships performed the same duties in our seas: as in this way we should avoid collisions between

the ships of different nations and consequent wars, "which constitute the weightiest objection to navies."

Whatever is connected with this branch of the national defence, which is at once the cheapest, the most efficient, the safest, and that which has earned for the United States a glory which can never die, is interesting; and it would seem from the preceding correspondence, that the cautious character of General Washington prevented his being a zealous advocate for a navy, in the straitened means of the public treasury at that time. Mr. Jefferson's own mind certainly seems to have oscillated more than once on this subject-sometimes seeing its value and importance as clearly as it is generally seen now, and therefore becoming its advocate; but at others, alarmed at its burthensome expense, and its exposing the country to collisions with other naval powers, to discomfiture and disgrace, and therefore becoming its opponent. The objections urged by him to this species of defence, in his letter to Mr. Adams, seems not to be well founded, either on the adoption of his own plan of dry docks, supposing them practicable within a reasonable limit of expense, or on the plan which has been subsequently adopted; since vessels perfectly defended from the sun and rain undergo no change in a long series of years, and occasion an insignificant expense for their safe keeping. It is not seen how there would be any advantage in Mr. Jefferson's plan over the one now adopted, in being more readily prepared for service, except the single one that a vessel could be floated into tide water by locks quicker than she could be launched; for in either case the rigging and equipment must take place after the ship had left her shelter, and all other preparation could be made as well on one plan as the other; and the first advantage may be more than compensated by the great cost of water-tight locks, constructed of the requisite depth and dimensions. But in truth the two plans are essentially the same; and it affords a striking illustration of the justice with which party censure is meted out, that a scheme which since, with a small modification, it has been tested by experiment, obtains universal approbation, was, when proposed by Mr. Jefferson, ridiculed as visionary.

The perusal of O'Meara's account of Bonaparte, disposed Mr. Jefferson somewhat to qualify his opinion of that extraordinary individual. "It places him in a higher scale of understanding than I had allotted him. I had thought him the greatest of all military captains, but an indifferent statesman, and misled by unworthy passions. The flashes, however, which escaped from him in these conversations with O'Meara,prove a mind of great expansion, though not of distinct developement and reasoning. He seizes results with rapidity and penetration, but never explains logically the process of reasoning by which he arrives at them." He thinks, too, that the book makes us "forget his atrocities for a moment, in commiseration of his sufferings, and proves also that nature had denied him the moral sense, the first excellence of well organized man." On this position Mr. Jefferson thus reasons: "If he could seriously and repeatedly affirm, that he had raised himself to power without ever having committed a crime, it proves that he wanted totally the sense of right and wrong. If he could consider the million of human lives which he had destroyed or caused to be destroyed, the desolations of countries by plunderings, burnings and famine, the destitutions of lawful rulers of the world without the consent of their constituents, to place his brothers and sisters on their thrones, the cutting up of established societies of men and jumbling them discordantly together again at his caprice, the demolition of the fairest hopes of mankind for the recovery of their rights and amelioration of their condition, and all the numberless train of his other enormities; the man, I say, who could consider all these as no crimes, must have been a moral monster, against whom every hand should have been lifted to slay him." Mr. Jefferson seems to regard his confinement as justifiable by the necessity of the case, (or on the plea of self-preservation,) but he condemns the cold blooded insults and vexations to which he was subjected."

Many of the letters between these venerable statesmen were on the subject of religion. Their thoughts were naturally more turned from the affairs of this life, to that which they must soon exchange for it. Mr. Jefferson strongly objected to the doctrine VOL. II.-57

of the trinity, which he considered as irreconcilable with the attributes of a supreme intelligence and almost as disguised atheism. The most of what he wrote, therefore, on religion, is controversial and confined to this topic. But though he dissented from the prevailing creeds, his mind seemed to be seriously and thoroughly embued with sentiments of a pure and exalted

theism.

The whole of this letter must give great satisfaction to those friends of Mr. Jefferson, who, taking their opinion of his religious creed from his enemies, or from some of his own unguarded expressions, had doubted his religious faith. A more entire conviction of the truths of natural theology, more clearly and logi cally exhibited, is no where to be found; and those who hated and reviled him for his supposed unbelief, may here find in him an able auxiliary against the infidelity which is so often denounced as a prevalent vice of the age.

In June, 1823, Mr. Monroe, then president, consulted Mr. Jefferson on the course it would be proper for the United States to take, in the attempt which was then made by the allied powers to interfere in the concerns of Spain, where the Cortes were making an effort to remodel their constitution, and in whose success the sympathies of the American people were strongly enlisted. Mr. Jefferson says that, abstracted as he had been for some time from politics, he could give but common place ideas in answer to his inquiries, and they would be but the widow's mite, and offered only because requested. "The matter," he remarks, "which now embroils Europe, the presumption of dictating to an independent nation the form of its government, is so arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation, as well as moral sentiment, enlists all our partialities and our prayers in favour of one, and our equal execrations against the other. I do not know, indeed, whether all nations do not owe to one another a bold and open declaration of their sympathies with the one party, and their detestation of the conduct of the other. But farther than this we are not bound to go; and, indeed, for the sake of the world, we ought not to increase the jealousies, or draw on ourselves the power of this formidable confederacy. I have

ever deemed it fundamental for the United States, never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labour, property, and lives of their people. On our part, never had a people so favourable a chance of trying the opposite system, of peace and fraternity with mankind, and the direction of all our means and faculties to the purposes of improvement instead of destruction. With Europe we have few occasions of collision, and these, with a little prudence and forbearance, may be generally accommodated. Of the brethren of our own hemisphere, none are yet, or for an age to come will be, in a shape, condition, or disposition to war against us. And the foothold which the nations of Europe had in either America, is slipping from under them, so that we shall be soon rid of their neighbourhood."

He considered England as not acting with good faith towards Spain; that her display of supporting liberal principles in Spain was understood by the allies, as meaning to deceive the English people, and gave no apprehensions to France. "It is," he says, "a theatrical farce, in which the five powers [meaning France, England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia] are the actors, England the Tartuffe, and her people the dupes."-"This war," he adds, "is evidently that of the general body of the aristocracy, in which England is also acting her part. 'Save but the nobles, and there shall be no war,' says she, masking her measures at the same time under the form of friendship and mediation, and hypocritically, while a party, offering herself as a judge, to betray those whom she is not permitted openly to oppose. A fraudulent neutrality, if neutrality at all, is all Spain will get from her. And Spain, probably, perceives this, and willingly winks at it rather than have her weight thrown openly into the other scale."