the undertaking to change the State laws of evidence in the State courts by certain parts of the stamp-act, &c. &c. have been solitary, inconsequential, timid things, in comparison with the audacious, barefaced, and sweeping pretension to a system of law for the United States, without the adoption of their legislature, and so infinitely beyond their power to adopt.  If this assumption be yielded to, the State courts may be shut up, as there will then be nothing to hinder citizens of the same State suing each other in the federal courts in every case, as on a bond for instance, because the common law obliges payment of it, and the common law they say is their law.  I am happy you have taken up the subject; and I have carefully perused and considered the notes you enclosed, and find but a single paragraph which I do not approve.  It is that wherein (page 2) you say, that laws being emanations from the legislative department, and, when once enacted, continuing in force from a presumption that their will so continues, that that presumption fails, and the laws of course fall, on the destruction of that legislative department.  I do not think this is the true bottom on which laws and the administering them rest.  The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself.  The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge, and to execute it.  It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it.  They may do it by a single person, as an Emperor of Russia (constituting his declarations evidence of their will), or by a few persons, as the aristocracy of Venice, or by a complication of councils, as in our former regal government, or our present republican one.  The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney.  This doctrine has been, in a certain degree, sanctioned by the federal executive.  For it is precisely that on which the continuance of obligation from our treaty with France was established, and the doctrine was particularly developed in a letter to Gouverneur Morris, written with the approbation of President Washington and his cabinet.  Mercer once prevailed on the Virginia Assembly to declare a different doctrine in some resolutions.  These met universal disapprobation in this, as well as the other States, and if I mistake not, a subsequent Assembly did something to do away the authority of their former unguarded resolutions.  In this case, as in all others, the true principle will be quite as effectual to establish the just deductions.  Before the revolution, the nation of Virginia had, by the organs