Two personages in Europe, of which your Majesty is one, have it in their power, at the approaching pacification, to render eminent service to nations in general, by incorporating into the act of pacification, a correct definition of the rights of neutrals on the high seas.  Such a definition, declared by all the powers lately or still belligerent, would give to those rights a precision and notoriety, and cover them with an authority, which would protect them in an important degree against future violation; and should any further sanction be necessary, that of an exclusion of the violating nation from commercial intercourse with all the others, would be preferred to war, as more analogous to the offence, more easy and likely to be executed with good faith.  The essential articles of these rights, too, are so few and simple as easily to be defined.

Having taken no part in the past or existing troubles of Europe, we have no part to act in its pacification.  But as principles may then be settled in which we have a deep interest, it is a great happiness for us that they are placed under the protection of an umpire, who, looking beyond the narrow bounds of an individual nation, will take under the cover of his equity the rights of the absent and unrepresented.  It is only by a happy concurrence of good characters and good occasions, that a step can now and then be taken to advance the well being of nations.  If the present occasion be good, I am sure your Majesty’s character will not be wanting to avail the world of it.  By monuments of such good offices may your life become an epoch in the history of the condition of man, and may He who called it into being for the good of the human family, give it length of days and success, and have it always in his holy keeping.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER XXXI.—­TO COLONEL MONROE, May 4, 1806

To Colonel Monroe.

Washington, May 4, 1806.

Dear Sir,

I wrote you on the 16th of March by a common vessel, and then expected to have had, on the rising of Congress, an opportunity of peculiar confidence to you.  Mr. Beckley then supposed he should take a flying trip to London, on private business.  But I believe he does not find it convenient.  He could have let you into the arcana rerum, which you have interests in knowing.  Mr. Pinckney’s pursuits having been confined to his peculiar line, he has only that general knowledge of what has passed here, which the public possess.  He has a just view of things so far as known to him.  Our old friend, Mercer, broke off from us some time ago, at first professing to disdain joining the federalists, yet from the habit of voting together, becoming soon identified with them.  Without carrying over with him one single person, he is now in a state of as perfect obscurity as if his name had never been known.  Mr. J. Randolph is in the same track, and will end