Your letter, Madam, of the 18th of August has been some days received, but a press of business has prevented the acknowledgment of it:  perhaps, indeed, I may have already trespassed too far on your attention.  With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learned to be perfectly indifferent; but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, and to need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.  The act of personal unkindness alluded to in your former letter, is said in your last to have been the removal of your eldest son from some office to which the judges had appointed him.  I conclude, then, he must have been a commissioner of bankruptcy.  But I declare to you, on my honor, that this is the first knowledge I have ever had that he was so.  It may be thought, perhaps, that I ought to have inquired who were such, before I appointed others.  But it is to be observed, that the former law permitted the judges to name commissioners occasionally only, for every case as it arose, and not to make them permanent officers.  Nobody, therefore, being in office, there could be no removal.  The judges, you well know, have been considered as highly federal; and it was noted that they confined their nominations exclusively to federalists.  The legislature, dissatisfied with this, transferred the nomination to the President, and made the offices permanent.  The very object in passing the law was, that he should correct, not confirm, what was deemed the partiality of the judges.  I thought it therefore proper to inquire, not whom they had employed, but whom I ought to appoint to fulfil the intentions of the law.  In making these appointments, I put in a proportion of federalists, equal, I believe, to the proportion they bear in numbers through the Union generally.  Had I known that your son had acted, it would have been a real pleasure to me to have preferred him to some who were named in Boston, in what was deemed the same line of politics.  To this I should have been led by my knowledge of his integrity, as well as my sincere dispositions towards yourself and Mr. Adams.

You seem to think it devolved on the judges to decide on the validity of the sedition law.  But nothing in the constitution has given them a right to decide for the executive, more than to the executive to decide for them.  Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them.  The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because the power was placed in their hands by the constitution.  But the executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, were bound to remit the execution of it; because that power has been confided to them by the constitution.  That instrument meant that its co-ordinate branches should be checks on each other.  But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for