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.