But to return to your letter; you ask for my opinion of the work you send me, and to let it go out to the public.  This I have ever made a point of declining (one or two instances only excepted).  Complimentary thanks to writers who have sent me their works, have betrayed me sometimes before the public, without my consent having been asked.  But I am far from presuming to direct the reading of my fellow-citizens, who are good enough judges themselves of what is worthy their reading.  I am, also, too desirous of quiet to place myself in the way of contention.  Against this I am admonished by bodily decay, which cannot be unaccompanied by corresponding wane of the mind.  Of this I am as yet sensible sufficiently to be unwilling to trust myself before the public, and when I cease to be so, I hope that my friends will be too careful of me to draw me forth and present me, like a Priam in armor, as a spectacle for public compassion.  I hope our political bark will ride through all its dangers; but I can in future be but an inert passenger.

I salute you with sentiments of great friendship and respect.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CLVII.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, January 22, 1821

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, January 22, 1821.

I was quite rejoiced, dear Sir, to see that you had health and spirits enough to take part in the late convention of your State, for revising its constitution, and to bear your share in its debates and labors.  The amendments of which we have as yet heard, prove the advance of liberalism in the intervening period; and encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand years ago.  This country, which has given to the world the example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also, for as yet it is but nominal with us.  The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms, in practice, the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.

Our anxieties in this quarter are all concentrated in the question, what does the Holy Alliance in and out of Congress mean to do with us on the Missouri question?  And this, by the bye, is but the name of the case, it is only the John Doe or Richard Roe of the ejectment.  The real question, as seen in the States afflicted with this unfortunate population, is, Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?  For if Congress has the power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the States, within the States, it will be but another exercise of that power, to declare that all shall be free.  Are we then to see again Athenian and Lacedaemonian confederacies?  To wage another Peloponnesian war to settle the ascendancy between them?  Or is this the tocsin of merely a servile war?  That remains to be seen:  but not, I hope, by you or me.  Surely, they will parley awhile, and give us time to get out of the way.  What a Bedlamite is man?  But let us