I take the liberty of enclosing a letter to Mr. Baylor, open, because I solicit your perusal of it.  It will, at the same time, furnish the apology for my not answering you from Philadelphia.  You ask for any communication I may be able to make, which may administer comfort to you.  I can give that which is solid.  The spirit of 1776 is not dead.  It has only been slumbering.  The body of the American people is substantially republican.  But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful manoeuvres, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves.  But time and truth have dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.  They see now that France has sincerely wished peace, and their seducers have wished war, as well for the loaves and fishes which arise out of war expenses, as for the chance of changing the constitution, while the people should have time to contemplate nothing but the levies of men and money.  Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York are coming majestically round to the true principles.  In Pennsylvania, thirteen out of twenty-two counties had already petitioned on the alien and sedition laws.  Jersey and New York had begun the same movement, and though the rising of Congress stops that channel for the expression of their sentiment, the sentiment is going on rapidly, and before their next meeting those three States will be solidly embodied in sentiment with the six southern and western ones.  The atrocious proceedings of France towards this country had well nigh destroyed its liberties.  The Anglomen and monocrats had so artfully confounded the cause of France with that of freedom, that both went down in the same scale.  I sincerely join you in abjuring all political connection with every foreign power:  and though I cordially wish well to the progress of liberty in all nations, and would for ever give it the weight of our countenance, yet they are not to be touched without contamination, from their other bad principles.  Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

Accept assurances of the constant and unaltered affection of, Dear Sir, your sincere friend and servant,

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CCLIII.—­TO EDMUND RANDOLPH, August 18, 1799

TO EDMUND RANDOLPH.

Monticello, August 18, 1799

Dear Sir,

I received only two days ago your favor of the 12th, and as it was on the eve of the return of our post, it was not possible to make so prompt a despatch of the answer.  Of all the doctrines which have ever been broached by the federal government, the novel one, of the common law being in force and cognizable as an existing law in their courts, is to me the most formidable.  All their other assumptions of ungiven powers have been in the detail.  The bank-law, the treaty-doctrine, the sedition-act, alien-act,