of no weight.  Perhaps by the next year England and France may be ready to take the field.  It will depend on the former principally, for the latter, though she may be then able, must wish still a little time to see her new arrangements well under way.  The English papers and English ministry say the King is well.  He is better, but not well:  no malady requires a longer time to insure against its return than insanity.  Time alone can distinguish accidental insanity from habitual lunacy.

The operations which have taken place in America lately fill me with pleasure.  In the first place, they realize the confidence I had, that, whenever our affairs go obviously wrong, the good sense of the people will interpose, and set them to rights.  The example of changing a constitution, by assembling the wise men of the State, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had given them.  The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberations, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men, and some of the accommodations of interest which it has adopted are greatly pleasing to me, who have before had occasions of seeing how difficult those interests were to accommodate.  A general concurrence of opinion seems to authorize us to say it has some defects.  I am one of those who think it a defect, that the important rights, not placed in security by the frame of the constitution itself, were not explicitly secured by a supplementary declaration.  There are rights which it is useless to surrender to the government, and which governments have yet always been fond to invade.  These are the rights of thinking, and publishing our thoughts by speaking or writing; the right of free commerce; the right of personal freedom.  There are instruments for administering the government so peculiarly trust-worthy, that we should never leave the legislature at liberty to change them.  The new constitution has secured these in the executive and legislative departments; but not in the judiciary.  It should have established trials by the people themselves, that is to say, by jury.  There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation, and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot, but in well defined cases.  Such an instrument is a standing army.  We are now allowed to say, such a declaration of rights, as a supplement to the constitution, where that is silent, is wanting, to secure us in these points.  The general voice has legitimated this objection.  It has not, however, authorized me to consider as a real defect, what I thought, and still think one, the perpetual re-eligibility of the President.  But three States out of eleven having declared against this, we must suppose we are wrong, according to the fundamental law of every society, the lex majoris partis, to which we are bound to submit.  And should the majority change their opinion, and become sensible that this trait in their constitution is wrong, I would wish it to remain uncorrected, as long as we can avail ourselves of the services of our great leader, whose talents and whose weight of character, I consider as peculiarly necessary to get the government so under way, as that it may afterwards be carried on by subordinate characters.