to think and provide for themselves; and their inexperience, their ignorance and bigotry, make them instruments often, in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides, to defeat their own rights and purposes.  This is the present situation of Europe and Spanish America.  But it is not desperate.  The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing, has eminently changed the condition of the world.  As yet, that light has dawned on the middling classes only of the men in Europe.  The kings and the rabble, of equal ignorance, have not yet received its rays; but it continues to spread, and while printing is preserved, it can no more recede than the sun return on his course.  A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail, so may a second, a third, &c.  But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, a fifth, or some subsequent one of the ever-renewed attempts will ultimately succeed.  In France, the first effort was defeated by Robespierre, the second by Bonaparte, the third by Louis XVIII., and his holy allies; another is yet to come, and all Europe, Russia excepted, has caught the spirit; and all will attain representative government, more or less perfect.  This is now well understood to be a necessary check on Kings, whom they will probably think it more prudent to chain and tame, than to exterminate.  To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation.  For what inheritance so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?  The spirit of the Spaniard, and his deadly and eternal hatred to a Frenchman, give me much confidence that he will never submit, but finally defeat this atrocious violation of the laws of God and man, under which he is suffering; and the wisdom and firmness of the Cortes, afford reasonable hope, that that nation will settle down in a temperate representative government, with an executive properly subordinated to that.  Portugal, Italy, Prussia, Germany, Greece, will follow suit.  You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious achievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven.

I observe your toast of Mr. Jay on the 4th of July, wherein you say that the omission of his signature to the Declaration of Independence was by accident.  Our impressions as to this fact being different, I shall be glad to have mine corrected, if wrong.  Jay, you know, had been in constant opposition to our laboring majority.  Our estimate at the time was, that he, Dickinson, and Johnson of Maryland, by their ingenuity, perseverance, and partiality to our English connection, had constantly kept us a year behind where we ought to have been, in our preparations and proceedings.  From about the date of the Virginia instructions of May the 15th, 1776, to declare Independence, Mr. Jay absented himself from Congress, and never