he is trampling, the burnings of ancient cities, devastations of great countries, the destruction of law and order, and demoralization of the world, should be arrested, even if it should place our peace a little further distant?  No.  You and I cannot differ in wishing that Russia, and Sweden, and Denmark, and Germany, and Spain, and Portugal, and Italy, and even England, may retain their independence.  And if we differ in our opinions about Towers and his four beasts and ten kingdoms, we differ as friends, indulging mutual errors, and doing justice to mutual sincerity and honesty.  In this spirit of sincere confidence and affection, I pray God to bless you here and hereafter.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXVII.—­TO DOCTOR WALTER JONES, January 2,1814

TO DOCTOR WALTER JONES.

Monticello, January 2,1814.

Dear Sir,

Your favor of November the 25th reached this place December the 21st, having been near a month on the way.  How this could happen I know not, as we have two mails a week both from Fredericksburg and Richmond.  It found me just returned from a long journey and absence, during which so much business had accumulated, commanding the first attentions, that another week has been added to the delay.

I deplore, with you, the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them; and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen.  These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening its relish for sound food.  As vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless, by forfeiting all title to belief.  That this has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit, I agree with you; and I have read with great pleasure the paper you enclosed me on that subject, which I now return.  It is at the same time a perfect model of the style of discussion which candor and decency should observe, of the tone which renders difference of opinion even amiable, and a succinct, correct, and dispassionate history of the origin and progress of party among us.  It might be incorporated, as it stands, and without changing a word, into the history of the present epoch, and would give to posterity a fairer view of the times than they will probably derive from other sources.  In reading it, with great satisfaction, there was but a single passage where I wished a little more developement of a very sound and catholic idea; a single intercalation to rest it solidly on true bottom.  It is near the end of the first page, where you make a statement of genuine republican maxims; saying, ’that the people ought to possess as much political power as can possibly consist with the order and security of society.’  Instead