“Come into the house, and I will show you something,” said the venerable man, then tottering to the grave.  I went, and he showed me some letters addressed to him by persons in Virginia, presenting, in no very enviable light, the character of Jefferson.  When I had read them, he remarked:  “You must not suppose I am anxious to prejudice your youthful mind against the great favorite of your people.  It is not so.  You seem solicitous to learn something of the men who have had so much agency in the establishment of the Government and the formation of the opinions of the people, that I am willing you should see upon what my opinions have, in a great degree, been formed.  Mr. Jefferson is still living, and still writing.  His pen seems to have lost none of its vigor, nor his heart any of its venom.  You will hear him greatly praised, and greatly abused.  I knew him at one time, but never intimately, and may be said only to know him as a public man; what of his private character I know, comes from the statements of others, and general report.  You have just seen some of these statements.  I knew the writers of these letters well, and know their statements to be entitled to credit, and I believe them.  They assure me that Mr. Jefferson is without moral principle.  His public conduct must convince every one of his want of political principle.  His whole life has been a bundle of contradictions.  He has had neither chart nor compass by which to regulate his course, but has universally adopted the expedient.

“That he has a great and most vigorous intellect is beyond all question; but most of its emanations have been the ad captandum to seize the current, and sail with it.  He saw the democratic proclivity of the people, he concentrated it by the use of his pen, and he has aided its expansion, until it threatens ruin to the Government.  He knows it, and he still perseveres.  Under the plea of inviting population, he advocated the extension of the franchise to aliens, and was really the parent from whose brain was born the naturalization laws, making citizens of every nationality, and giving them all the powers of the Government, extending suffrage to every pauper in the land, increasing to the utmost the material for the demagogue, and thus depriving the intelligence of the country of the power to control it.  The specious argument that if a man is compelled to serve in the militia and defend the country, he should be entitled to vote, was his.  Its sophistry is as palpable to Jefferson as to every thinking mind.  Government is the most abstruse of the sciences, and should, for the security of all, be controlled by the intelligence of the country.  During the world’s existence, all the intelligence it has ever afforded, has not been competent to the formation of a government approximating perfection.