To the printed inquiries respecting our schools, it is not in my power to give an answer.  Age, debility, an ancient dislocated, and now stiffened wrist, render writing so slow and painful, that I am obliged to decline every thing possible requiring writing.  An act of our legislature will inform you of our plan of primary schools, and the annual reports show that it is becoming completely abortive, and must be abandoned very shortly, after costing us to this day one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and yet to cost us forty-five thousand dollars a year more until it shall be discontinued; and if a single boy has received the elements of common education, it must be in some part of the country not known to me.  Experience has but too fully confirmed the early predictions of its fate.  But on this subject I must refer you to others more able than I am to go into the necessary details; and I conclude with the assurances of my great esteem and respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CLXV.—­TO DOCTOR WATERHOUSE, July 19, 1822

TO DOCTOR WATERHOUSE.

Monticello, July 19, 1822.

Dear Sir,

An anciently dislocated, and now stiffening wrist, makes writing an operation so slow and painful to me, that I should not so soon have troubled you with an acknowledgment of your favor of the 8th, but for the request it contained of my consent to the publication of my letter of June the 26th.  No, my dear Sir, not for the world.  Into what a nest of hornets would it thrust my head! the genus irritabile vatum, on whom argument is lost, and reason is, by themselves, disclaimed in matters of religion.  Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world, but the redressment of mental vagaries would be an enterprise more than Quixotic.  I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding, as inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian.  I am old, and tranquillity is now my summum bonum.  Keep me, therefore, from the fire and faggots of Calvin and his victim Servetus.  Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mycologists of the middle and modern ages.  I am not aware of the peculiar resistance to Unitarianism, which you ascribe to Pennsylvania.  When I lived in Philadelphia there was a respectable congregation of that sect, with a meeting-house and regular service which I attended, and in which Doctor Priestley officiated to numerous audiences.  Baltimore has one or two churches, and their pastor, author of an inestimable book on this subject, was elected chaplain to the late Congress.  That doctrine has not yet been preached to us:  but the breeze begins to be felt which precedes the storm; and fanaticism is all in a bustle, shutting its doors and windows