recollected or explained on either side.
Your idea of providing as many arms as we have fighting men, is undoubtedly a sound one. Its execution, however, depends on the Legislature. Composed, indeed, of gentlemen of the best intentions, but like all others collected in mass, requiring considerable time to receive impressions, however useful, if new. Time and reflection will not fail in the end to bring them to whatever is right. The session before the last I proposed to them the classification of the militia, so that those in the prime of life only, and unburthened with families, should ever be called into distant service; and that every man should receive a stand of arms the first year he entered the militia. This would have required 40,000 stands a year, and in a few years would have armed the whole, besides the stock in the public arsenals, which is a good one. Converts to the measure are daily coming over, and it will prevail in time. The same thing will happen as to the employing the surplus of our revenues to roads, rivers, canals, education. The proposition for building lock-docks for the preservation of our navy, has local rivalries to contend against. Till these can be overruled or compromised, the measure can never be adopted. Yet there ought never to be another ship built until we can provide some method of preserving them through the long intervals of peace which I hope are to be the lot of our country. I understand that, employing private as well as the public manufactories, we can make about 40,000 stand of arms a year. But they come so much dearer than the imported of equal quality, that we shall import also. From the beginning of my administration, I have discouraged the laying in stores of powder, but have recommended great stores of sulphur and salt-petre. I confess, however, I do not apprehend that the dislike which I know the European governments have to our form, will combine them in any serious attempts against it. They have too many jealousies of one another, to engage in distant wars for a matter of opinion only. I verily believe that it will ever be in our power to keep so even a stand between England and France, as to inspire a wish in neither to throw us into the scale of his adversary. But if we can do this for a dozen years only, we shall have little to fear from them. Accept my salutations, and assurances of esteem and respect.
TO LEVETT HARRIS, ESQ
Sir,—Your letters of August 10th and September 18th have been duly received, and I have to thank you for the safe transmission of the four volumes of the "Vocabulaires Comparés de Pallas," for which I am indebted, through you, to the Minister of Commerce, Count Romanzoff. I must pray you, in a particular manner, to express to his Excellency my sensibility for this mark of his obliging attention, rendered the more impressive from a high esteem for his personal character, and from the hope that an interchange of personal esteem may contribute to strengthen the friendship of the two nations, bound together by many similar interests. To this I must add by anticipation my thanks for his work on the Commerce of Russia, as well as to Count Potoski, for the two works from him, which you mention to have been sent by Mr. A. Smith, and which, I doubt not, will come safely to hand. Accept for yourself my salutations and assurances of esteem and respect.
TO MR. GALLATIN
A doubt is entertained whether the Acts of Congress respecting claims to lands in Orleans and Louisiana, and authorizing the commissioners "to decide according to the laws and established usages and customs of the French and Spanish governments, upon all claims to lands within their respective districts," &c., meant to give that power as to all claims, or to restrict it to those claims only which had been previously recognized by Congress.
Were it necessary for us to decide that question, I should be of opinion that it meant all claims, because the words are general. "All claims to lands within their respective districts," and there are no other words restricting them to those claims only, previously recognized by Congress; and because the intention of the Act was to quiet and satisfy all the minor claimants, and reserve only the great and fraudulent speculations for rigorous examination.
But the Board of Commissioners, being a judiciary tribunal, I should think it proper to leave them to the law itself, as their instructions, on the meaning of which they are competent to decide, and, being on the spot, are better informed of the nature of those claims than we are. Affectionate salutations.
TO GENERAL DEARBORNE
Many officers of the army being involved in the offence of intending a military enterprise against a nation at peace with the United States, to remove the whole without trial, by the paramount authority of the executive, would be a proceeding of unusual severity. Some line must therefore be drawn to separate the more from the less guilty. The only sound one which occurs to me is between those who believed the enterprise was with the approbation of the government, open or secret, and those who meant to proceed in defiance of the government. Concealment would be no line at all, because all concealed it. Applying the line of defiance to the case of Lieutenant Meade, it does not appear by any testimony I have seen, that he meant to proceed in defiance of the government, but, on the contrary, that he was made to believe the government approved of the expedition. If it be objected that he concealed a part of what had taken place in his communications to the Secretary at War, yet if a concealment of the whole would not furnish a proper line of distinction, still less would the concealment of a part. This too would be a removal for prevarication, not for unauthorized enterprise, and could not be a proper ground for exercising the extraordinary power of removal by the President. On the whole, I think Lieutenant Meade's is not a case for its exercise. Affectionate salutations.
TO MR. ROBERT PATTERSON
Dear Sir,—I have duly received your letter of the 25th, proposing the appointment of an assistant-engraver to the Mint, at a salary of $600, and that Mr. Reich should be the assistant. You are so exclusively competent to decide on the want of such an officer, that I approve the proposition in the faith of your opinion. With respect to the person to be appointed, my knowledge of the superior talents of Mr. Reich concurs with your recommendation in the propriety of appointing him.
I should approve of your employing the Mint on small silver coins, rather than on dollars and gold coins, as far as the consent of those who employ it can be obtained. It would be much more valuable to the public to be supplied with abundance of dimes and half dimes, which would stay among us, than with dollars and eagles which leave us immediately. Indeed I wish the law authorized the making two cent and three cent pieces of silver, and golden dollars, which would all be large enough to handle, and would be a great convenience to our own citizens. Accept my affectionate salutations.
TO M. LE COMTE DIODATI
My Dear and Ancient Friend,—Your letter of August the 29th reached me on the 18th of February. It enclosed a duplicate of that written from Brunswick five years before, but which I never received, or had notice of, but by this duplicate. Be assured, my friend, that I was incapable of such negligence towards you, as a failure to answer it would have implied. It would illy have accorded with those sentiments of friendship I entertained for you at Paris, and which neither time nor distance has lessened. I often pass in review the many happy hours I spent with Madame Diodati and yourself on the banks of the Seine, as well as at Paris, and I count them among the most pleasing I enjoyed in France. Those were indeed days of tranquillity and happiness. They had begun to cloud a little before I left you; but I had no apprehension that the tempest, of which I saw the beginning, was to spread over such an extent of space and time. I have often thought of you with anxiety, and wished to know how you weathered the storm, and into what port you had retired. The letters now received give me the first information, and I sincerely felicitate you on your safe and quiet retreat. Were I in Europe, pax et panis would certainly be my motto. Wars and contentions, indeed, fill the pages of history with more matter. But more blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say. This
