My Dear Sir:—I know how precious your time is, and how exclusively you devote it to the duties of your office, yet I venture to ask a few hours or minutes of it on motives of public service, as well as private friendship. I will explain the occasion of the application. You recollect enough of the old Congress to remember that their mode of managing the business of the House was not only unparliamentary, but that the forms were so awkward and inconvenient that it was impossible sometimes to get at the true sense of the majority. The House of Representatives of the United States are now pretty much in the same situation. In the Senate it is in our power to get into a better way; our ground is this: The Senate have established a few rules for their government, and have subjected the decisions on these and on all other points of order without debate, and without appeal, to the judgment of their President, he, for his own sake, as well as theirs, must prefer recurring to some system of rules ready formed; and there can be no question that the Parliamentary rules are the best known to us for managing the debates, and obtaining the sense of a deliberative body. I have therefore made them my rule of decision, rejecting those of the old Congress altogether, and it gives entire satisfaction to the Senate; insomuch that we shall not only have a good system there, but probably, by the example of its effects, produce a conformity in the other branch. But in the course of this business I find perplexities, having for twenty years been out of deliberative bodies, and become rusty as to many points of proceeding; and so little has the Parliamentary branch of the law been attended to, that I not only find no person here, but not even a book to aid me. I had, at an early period of life, read a good deal on the subject, and common-placed what I read. This common-place has been my pillar; but there are many questions of practice on which that is silent, some of them are so minute indeed, and belong too much to every-day's practice, that they have never been thought worthy of being written down, yet from desuetude they have slipped my memory. You will see by the enclosed paper what they are. I know with what pain you write: therefore I have left a margin in which you can write a simple negative or affirmative opposite every position, or perhaps, with as little trouble, correct the text by striking out or interlining. This is what I have earnestly to solicit from you, and I would not have given you the trouble if I had had any other resource. But you are, in fact, the only spark of Parliamentary science now remaining to us. I am the more anxious, because I have been forming a manual of Parliamentary law which I mean to deposit with the Senate as the standard by which I judge, and am willing to be judged. Though I should be opposed to its being printed, yet it may be done perhaps without my consent; and in that case I should be sorry indeed should it go out with errors that a Tyro should not have committed. And yet it is precisely those to which I am most exposed. I am less afraid as to important matters, because for them I have printed authorities; but it is those small matters of daily practice, which twenty years ago were familiar to me, but have in that time escaped my memory. I hope under these circumstances you will pardon the trouble I propose to you in the enclosed paper. I am not pressed in time, so that your leisure will be sufficient for me. Accept the salutations of grateful and sincere friendship and attachment, and many prayers for your health and happiness from, Dear Sir,
Yours affectionately.
[2] Order of the House of Commons, 1663, July 16.
[3] Elsynge, 217; 1 Hats. 21; 1 Grey's Deb. 133.
[4] In a case of division of the question, and a decision against striking out, I advance, doubtingly, the opinion here expressed. I find no authority either way; and I know it may be viewed under a different aspect. It may be thought, that having decided separately not to strike out the passage, the same question for striking out cannot be put over again, though with a view to a different insertion. Still I think it more reasonable and convenient to consider the striking out and insertion as forming one proposition; but should readily yield to any evidence that the contrary is the practice in Parliament.
[5] Noes.—9 Grey, 365.
[6] [These are the volumes containing the celebrated Anas, up to the time of the author's retirement from the Secretaryship of State. Some of his friends have regretted that they were ever published. However that may be, they have been published, and it was manifestly the purpose of Mr. Jefferson that they should be. Late in life, "when the passions of the times had passed away," he carefully revised them for publication. "At this day," he says, "after the lapse of twenty-five years, or more, from their dates, I have given to the whole a calm revisal, when the passions of the times are passed away, and the reasons of the transactions act alone upon the judgment. Some of the informations I had recorded, are now cut out from the rest, because I have seen that they were incorrect, or doubtful, or merely personal or private, with which we have nothing to do. I should, perhaps, not have thought the rest worth preserving, but for their testimony against the only history of that period, which pretends to have been compiled from authentic and unpublished documents." Under these circumstances, the Editor has not felt himself at liberty to exclude the Anas from a publication professing to be a complete edition of the writings of Jefferson. They are accordingly inserted just in the form in which he left them after his last revisal.—Ed.]
[7] [The opinions here alluded to will be found in Book III., devoted to Official Papers.—Ed.]
[8] See conversation with General Washington, October 1, 1792.
[9] There had been a previous consultation at the President's (about the first week in November) on the expediency of suspending payments to France, under her present situation. I had admitted that the late constitution was dissolved by the dethronement of the King; and the management of affairs surviving to the National Assembly only, this was not an integral Legislature, and therefore not competent to give a legitimate discharge for our payments: that I thought, consequently, that none should be made till some legitimate body came into place; and that I should consider the National Convention called, but not met as we had yet heard, to be a legitimate body. Hamilton doubted whether it would be a legitimate body, and whether, if the King should be re-established, he might not disallow such payments on good grounds. Knox, for once, dared to differ from Hamilton, and to express, very submissively, an opinion, that a convention named by the whole body of the nation, would be competent to do anything. It ended by agreeing, that I should write to Gouverneur Morris to suspend payment generally till further orders.